FAQ

What is this?

The answers to the crossword are chosen from the 1000 most used passwords for Adobe user accounts from the recent password leak. The clues are up to 50 of the most commonly used hints for each of the passwords.

Why did you make this?

Partly because I had a look at the password dump and found it surprisingly fun to try and guess people's passwords; partly to highlight how insecure most common memorable passwords are and how little you should trust that corporations, such as Adobe, are following best practice when it comes to storing them.

But isn't releasing these passwords a huge security risk?

Not any more. The passwords in these crosswords will have already been guessed long ago by people who have far more time and computing power to put towards it.

For example Facebook is putting efforts towards finding Adobe passwords to protect their users, and Facebook has a lot more power at their disposal in terms of minds and computers than I do.

My password is in this crossword!

Then you A: have a bad password; and B: should change your password as soon as you can anywhere else you may have used it.

The current best practice for passwords is to generate a unique random password for every login and use a password management service such as KeePass, RoboForm, or LastPass.

Where did you get the idea?

I originally got the idea from xkcd #1286: Encryptic, and the technique he uses there can indeed be used to work out some of the harder clues, however most of the ones used here are pretty easy to guess without looking at the tail end of the hash.

How do you know your answers are correct?

I don't. However I am fairly confident of most of them. The top 100 are taken directly from the Stricture Group top 100 adobe passwords; the rest are guessed based on the clues. If you do think I've got something incorrect then please let me know which you believe to be wrong, and why.

How many of the passwords were used to create this?

I've only used the 1000 most common passwords in this, of those I guessed 65%, spending less than 10 seconds on each, the remaining ones were mostly people's names or non-English words. If someone wants to give me a more complete list of answers then I will gladly generate some more crosswords.