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Re:Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen by Natanael_L on Saturday September 23, 2017 @02:48PM (#15321067)
Bitcoin brain wallets based on obscure Africa poems have been successfully cracked. Don't trust your choice of obscure books to be sufficient.
Re:Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen by chiph on Saturday September 23, 2017 @05:49PM (#15321946)
I need to look into that some.

If I walk into a library, pick a floor, aisle, shelf, book, and page at random (just walk, don't think about it), and use a phrase that is a minimum of 12 words long -- is that more random than what I presume happened here, where someone knew that their target liked that style of poetry and was able to concentrate their search on that genre? ( a "crib" in Bletchley Park terms)

The comments about English grammar are correct - classes of words (nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc) do fall in certain positional order and frequency analysis becomes important. A brute-force attacker would have to work through four types of passwords - the commonly used passwords like "12345" and "letmein", language-based phrases (like my not-great idea), language-based phrases with letter substitution (leet-speak, etc), and then truly random letter sequences.

Re:Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen by Natanael_L on Saturday September 23, 2017 @06:21PM (#15322102)
What's happening is that people collect endless phrases and alter them with a ton of standard manipulation schemes, compute the corresponding private and public keys & addresses for all the variations, create a lookup table for the addresses and private keys, and as soon as they see a known keypair in use then they use the corresponding private key to swipe the funds.