Crossword puzzle made from 1,000 leaked Adobe passwords: Is yours in there?

For over a month, software giant Adobe has been in the news as a result of the security breach that affected over 150 million people.

You know the saying “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade”? Well, Ben Falconer, Engineering Ph.D. student with 13 years of programming experience, took that saying one step further and decided, “when life hands you leaked passwords, make a crossword puzzle.”

 
The crossword puzzle consists of 1,000 leaked Adobe passwords.

“I had a look at the password dump and found it surprisingly fun to try and guess people's passwords; partly to highlight how insecure most common memorable passwords are and how little you should trust that corporations, such as Adobe, are following best practice when it comes to storing them,” Falconer wrote on the puzzle’s website.

His project, called Adobe Crossword, is a compilation of 10 crossword puzzles that use the most common 1,000 passwords discovered in the Adobe security breach. The clues for each password are the most commonly used hints on the website for each of the passwords.

Falconer also suggests that if you see your password in this crossword puzzle you should probably change it.

According to Falconer, “the current best practice for passwords is to generate a unique random password for every login and use a password management service such as KeePass, RoboForm, or LastPass.

He created the crossword using a list of the top 100 Adobe passwords provided by security firm Stricture Group. He does admit that the rest of the passwords he put in the puzzle were guessed using the clues.

If you have some time on your hands, give the crossword puzzle a try. (Don’t worry, you can reveal the answers with the click of a button if it’s too challenging.)