Some Perlmonks password statistics

Originally published on 29 July 2009 by Carl Mäsak.

PerlMonks has been hacked, and someone (or more likely a group of people) will perhaps feel the requisite brand of shame over the fact that a lot of people’s passwords were leaked, because they were stored in clear text. Not only does that constitute a poor technological solution, it’s also putting other people’s entrusted private information, and parts of their digital identity, at risk. With people’s privacy comes great responsibility.

Anyway, I took the leaked passwords and ran them through a script to get a bit of statistics on the different types of passwords used by a representative slice of the Perlmonks users:

total                 567  (100.00%)
  alphanumerics-only  517  ( 91.18%)
    digits-only         9  (  1.59%)
    letters-only      233  ( 41.09%)
    letters&u-score     2  (  0.35%)
    letters&digits    277  ( 48.85%)
      letters&1digit  103  ( 18.17%)
      letters&2digits  89  ( 15.70%)
      letters&3digits  39  (  6.88%)
      letters&4digits  36  (  6.35%)
      letters&5digits   9  (  1.59%)
      letters&6digits   1  (  0.18%)
  with non-alnums      50  (  8.82%)
    1 non-alnum        34  (  6.00%)
    2 non-alnums       14  (  2.47%)
    3 non-alnums        2  (  0.35%)

Here’s the source code, a simple Raku script. The source data is easy to find, but I’m not going to link to it.