I remember that a few years ago, when I still used Twitter, I asked an open-ended question there: what are the most common passwords used for malware archives?
This may sound silly, but there are a looooooot of the ‘default’ ones out there. And while at that time I got a few good answers, most of them circulated around the usual suspects:
- malware
- virus
- infected
- inf3cted
- etc.
and their variants.
Today, using AI, we can dig deeper.
Googling:
default malware sample passwords including infected virus malware "inf3cted"
adds a few possible candidates, but then we start asking more questions and we end up adding the following entries:
- 1337
- mysubsarethebest
- history
- pass
- god
- 123
- 1234
- 123456
- 12345678
- 123456789
- 111111
- qwerty
- virussign
- 8466
- infected_pcap
- infected666 + the last character before the zip extension
- clean (this is for clean samples)
- velvet
- VelvetSweatshop (old, default password for Excel)
- S1BinaryVault
- p@ssword
- shipped
- invoice
- doc
The most powerful bit here is not the list of all the possible passwords we can generate, but the list of prompts that got us here. I don’t include them in this post, because I want to emphasize that it was not really AI that did all the work, but… me.