My professional work straddles applications of artificial intelligence to computer security and securing artificial intelligence systems. Academically, my interests include applications of game theory to malware mitigation, foundations of computer science, and category theory.
If remote access to corporate networks is only as secure as the weakest link, only some dreadfully weak passwords now stand between hackers and many organizations' most sensitive data, according to new research from Rapid7 into the two most widely used remote access protocols - SSH and RDP.
We conclude from this observation that online credential attackers are not generating truly random passwords, but are instead working entirely off of lists of guessable passwords. In addition, Rapid7 found that passwords that are observed more frequently are observed exponentially more frequently than the less common passwords. In other words, some passwords simply work more often than others.