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Comments on ‘Chocolate the key to uncovering PC passwords’

Sweet talk and sweets is all it takes

Published Tuesday 17th April 2007 09:44 GMT

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This assumes that the respondents always tell the truth 

By Phil Hall
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 09:58 GMT

Free chocolate bar for lying. Result!

How was this verified? 

By Ian Ferguson
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 09:59 GMT

Short of using the gained passwords to hack into the businessmen's corporate accounts, how did they verify that they were receiving genuine passwords? I would quite happily make something up in return for free chocolate. My password is "Kangaroo42", where's my Dairy Milk?

I'd do it! 

By Mark
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 10:04 GMT

Free chocolate...

Well I'd sure give a password for that, one that I've just made up to get the chocolate though. No need to give your real password is there

How did they know... 

By paulm
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 10:11 GMT

... that the given password was real? For a bar of chocolate I'd make up a password.

Lie? 

By Jamie Cole
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 10:12 GMT

Who's to say the vast majority of these people didn't lie and give a fake password in order to get some free chocolate? I know I would...

Missing the Point 

By c price
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 10:48 GMT

Of course lots of us would lie to get our free chocolate, and walk away thinking how we've beaten the system. Meanwhile the researchers chalk up an alarming high statistic on how easy it is to get passwords, which they can then sell on to companies selling security software. And by the time they quote the stat, the details on how it was obtained are quietly dropped.

There are lies, damned lies and Market Research....

Damn.... 

By Simon Harris
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 11:41 GMT

why am I never around when they're handing out free chocolate?

Surely it would be better to use free alcohol as the bribe 

By John Miles
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 11:42 GMT

Then you can compare answers before and after and thus work out the proportion lying

where do we sign up

What kind of chocolate ? 

By Pascal Monett
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 11:48 GMT

I demand to know what chocolate was used to obtain the password ! I won't give away a fake password if it's not at least 70% pure cocoa.

Anything less is not even worthy of my making something up.

As for my real password, I'll think about giving that up the day some hooded figure is screaming for it and putting a gun to my forehead. Anyone else can just go on dreaming that they know my password.

MWAHAHAHAHAHA... Who's the patsy? 

By Stefan Paetow
Posted Tuesday 17th April 2007 12:53 GMT

NOT the professionals. It's the researchers.

Heck, I'll give them *real* passwords for chocolate 

By fluffy
Posted Wednesday 18th April 2007 00:15 GMT

I'll happily give away a real password to my account. Of course it'll be a password from a year ago, since we have a 3-month password change policy and I have such a weird memory that I can remember most of my vaguely-pronounceable line noise (probably because I use mnemonics to memorize it to begin with).

Am I also weird for remembering the license plate numbers of my family cars growing up?

Valuable offer 

By John Stirling
Posted Friday 20th April 2007 22:23 GMT

Hello therere,

I writing to you as very very trustworthy individual, and endeavorur that you help with this very important task. My father, late of Switzerland, was the CEO of Nestle, and he held in his personal supply 26 million bars of chocolate.

For the last 14 months of his life he was much trying to take this chocolate from Switzerland, but the government stopped him. If you will assist me in this matter you will receive 10% and this is 2.6 million bars of chocolate for assisting myself in this important and ethical matter.

All I require initially as evidence of your superior trustworthiness is the access name and password for your computer systems.

re: Am I also weird for remembering the license plate numbers of my family cars growing up? 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Saturday 21st April 2007 08:07 GMT

No . Not unless I'm weird too.

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