Ken Thompson Unix Bsd Password

Have you heard that Unix co-founder Ken Thompson's 39-year old BSD password has finally been cracked? Learn more in an interesting The Hacker News article:

A 39-year-old login password ofKen Thompson, the co-creator of the UNIX operating system among, has finally been cracked that belongs to a BSD-based system, one of the original versions of UNIX, which was back then used by various computer science pioneers.

In 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen spotted an interesting "/etc/passwd" file in a publicly available source tree of historian BSD version 3, which includes hashed passwords belonging to more than two dozens Unix luminaries who worked on UNIX development, including Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt, Stuart Feldman, and Brian W. Kernighan.

Since all passwords in that list are protected using now-depreciated DES-based crypt(3) algorithm and limited to at most 8 characters, Neukirchen decided to brute-force them for fun and successfully cracked passwords (listed below) for almost everyone using password cracking tools like John the Ripper and hashcat.

The link for this article located at The Hacker News is no longer available.