An administrator accidentally deleted the production database

Re:An administrator accidentally deleted the production data... by jvoorhis on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @11:51AM (#11345520)

At a startup earlier in my career, we generated an email address for every customer which they could use to interact with our system. The CEO wrote a script to pick words at random from the Princeton Wordnet database.

One afternoon I thought, wait a minute, what's actually in Wordnet?

Needless to say, many apology emails were sent later that day.

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Re:An administrator accidentally deleted the production data... by cvwright on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @07:12PM (#11349100)

In recent years, I created a homework assignment for a security class where the student's job is to crack a set of password files. First easy, un-salted hashes, then salted hashes, ... etc.

To illustrate the badness of using dictionary words as a password, I randomly generated a unique password file for each user by sampling from /usr/share/dict/words.

> One afternoon I thought, wait a minute, what's actually in Wordnet?

I know exactly how you feel. It took me about 5 minutes to find Shutterstock's list of dirty, naughty, obscene, and otherwise bad words [1], and about 20 more minutes to add a blacklist check to my script.

Fortunately none of the students had actually been given a bad word. Whew!

[1] https://github.com/shutterstock/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscen...

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Re:An administrator accidentally deleted the production data... by aptwebapps on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:47PM (#11346072)

Actual two-word passphrase from an AOL disc once in my possession: 'cloaca market'.

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