JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing: Early versions of the free/open Unix variant BSD came with password files that included hashed passwords for such Unix luminaries as Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Eric Schmidt, Brian W. Kernighan and Stuart Feldman. Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and revealed that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie’s was “dmac,” Bourne’s was “bourne,” Schmidt’s was “wendy!!!” (his wife’s name), Feldman’s was “axlotl,” and Kernighan’s was “/.,/.,.” Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Ozalp Babaolu’s was “12ucdort,” Howard Katseff’s was “graduat;,” Tom London’s was “..pnn521,” Bob Fabry’s was “561cml..” and Ken Thompson’s was “p/q2-q4!” (chess notation for a common opening move). BSD 3 used Descrypt for password hashing, which limited passwords to eight characters, salted with 12 bits of entropy.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot