I upgraded my Mac laptop to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion a few weeks ago, and at the same time I decided to turn on FileVault for (almost) full disk encryption. I’m not paranoid, but If I want to get into infosec, I should at least try to be secure myself.

Around the same time my fiancée had said that her Windows laptop was running slow, and then her hotmail account got compromised. I checked her laptop for anything malicious (all seemed ok) but I didn’t have time to try and find out why it was running slow right then, so I set her up with an account on my Mac laptop. I had not enforced any password policy on my Mac laptop (I’m not even sure how to do that – I’ll have to find out soon), so I asked her if she would mind telling me what password she had used because her password would be able to unlock the FileVault (almost) full disk encryption and her password could be the weak link.

She obviously trusts me because she told me, and I knew from experience with John The Ripper/Hascat/etc that it would easily be cracked using brute force by the proper tools in a matter of seconds because it followed a very common pattern. It turned out that her hotmail account was using a similarly simple password, so it was no great surprise that it had been compromised.

I explained with the help of this great XKCD comic that a password can be hard to crack, but easy to remember:

She is now using a passwords around 30 characters long! This means some of her passwords are probably stronger than some of mine… I have some catching up to do!