Are signs of the zodiac used as passwords?
Tues 13th July 12
I was wondering why dragon and monkey come up so often in Pipal analysis of password lists and it got me wondering if it was to do with Chinese signs of the zodiac so just as an experiment I've just added checking for both Western and Chinese zodiac signs to Pipal. I ran it against the 1 million eHarmony passwords I've got and it looks like they do play a small part in some people passwords:
Western Zodiac
| Sign | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| aries | 141 | 0.01 |
| taurus | 42 | 0.0 |
| gemini | 63 | 0.01 |
| cancer | 57 | 0.01 |
| leo | 1502 | 0.14 |
| virgo | 55 | 0.01 |
| libra | 85 | 0.01 |
| scorpius | 2 | 0.0 |
| sagittarius | 6 | 0.0 |
| capricorn | 10 | 0.0 |
| aquarius | 7 | 0.0 |
| pisces | 30 | 0.0 |
Chinese Zodiac
| Sign | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| rat | 2185 | 0.2 |
| ox | 3439 | 0.32 |
| tiger | 581 | 0.05 |
| rabbit | 136 | 0.01 |
| dragon | 341 | 0.03 |
| snake | 116 | 0.01 |
| horse | 370 | 0.03 |
| goat | 398 | 0.04 |
| monkey | 507 | 0.05 |
| rooster | 28 | 0.0 |
| dog | 4522 | 0.42 |
| pig | 649 | 0.06 |
Admittedly some of the words are base words for other more popular words, and I used scorpius not scorpio (copy and paste from Wikipedia) but there might be something there. I'd expect this to be more the case on sites like eHarmony and Facebook than on more business oriented sites. Obviously the Chinese signs I'd also expect to be more prevalent in lists dumped from sites around Asia.
I've not committed this to the main git branch yet just because it slows the Pipal run down too much so I'm going to play with things and see what I can speed up and also add some command line flags to disable these extra features for those who just want raw data. Expect an update soon.
