The wisdom of the ill informed

Allen netsecurity at sound-by-design.com
Fri Jun 27 14:38:27 EDT 2008


Hi gang,

All quiet on the cryptography front lately, I see. However, that 
does not prevent practices that *appear* like protection but are not 
even as strong as wet toilet paper.

I had to order a medical device today and they need a signed 
authorization for payment by my insurance carrier. No biggie. So 
they ask how I want it set to me and I said via e-mail. Okay. /Then/ 
they said it was an encrypted file and I thought, cool. How wrong 
could I be?

Very. The (I hate to use this term for something so pathetic) 
password for the file is 6 (yes, six) numeric characters!

My 6 year old K6-II can crack this in less than one minute as there 
are only 1.11*10^6 possible.

You can lead a horse to water....

Best,

Allen

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