> A plurality of Gawker Media passwords are six characters long<p>A plurality of <i>brute forced</i> Gawker Media passwords are six characters long. Maybe this statistic is valid for all 1.5 million passwords, but that's quite a lot of extrapolation. Taking the easiest 10% of passwords to brute force and basing the data off that?<p>They mention this fact on the paragraph prior, and then seem to forget about it: "In both cases, the datasets only include passwords that could be decoded and aren’t necessarily representive [sic] of all users."
I'm not sure this even matters. Gawker accounts are for commenting on inane media stories. If people used the same password for their email, that's one thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if most had a harder password for their email, and resorted to 123456 etc. for less important accounts.
I got two emails today claiming to be from gawker, telling me to change my password.<p>Both were phishing emails that pointed to a domain in China and another in India. These guys move fast
My favorite is always the people who go the extra length and use '12345678'.<p>Also, why are Jennifer and Michelle the first female names on the list? Are they just the most common names for women?<p>And is there a story to "monkey"?