Password cracker

We, as most other people these days, have a computer at home. And our son and daughter sometimes like to play with it. Surf some kid sites, or just play music on iTunes, or whatever. Once in a while however, we lock it (the good ol’ ctrl-alt-delete) to prevent the kids from messing with it too much when we have important things we’re working on at the moment.

This of course, is not very popular. Especially with our son. He just can’t stand the fact that there is a password to access the computer that he doesn’t know. So, the questions keep coming: “What is the password?”, “Why can’t you tell me?”, etc, etc. And when it becomes obvious to him that I’m not going to tell him this time either, he starts  his brute force attack. I see words such as: “administratoror” (misspelled), our last name and his first name, random object names visible from where he’s sitting like “pen” and so on. It seems to me he’s trying his first dictionary attack. I feel proud.

The other day, our daughter comes running to us and tells us that her brother now has figured out the password. I of course find this very hard to believe, but I play along and go to the computer room to see what he’s up to.

“I know what your password is”, he says beaming.

“Yeah? What is it then?”, I ask.

” Incorrect!”, he responds.

“Incorrect?”, I say, somewhat confused.

He points to the screen, where a typical windows dialog window is displaying the message: “Your password is incorrect”.

Duh!