We Christians very well know that the Bible has all the answers to our life's questions, thus serving as the prime manual on how to live life to the fullest as designed by God.
Some might have taken that to the extreme literal sense, even using the verses not only to provide inspiration but also protection from hackers by way of referencing their passwords to certain popular or familiar verses from the Bible.
It turns out that is not a very good idea.
An analysis of the passwords cracked in the 2009 hacking of the online gaming website Rockyou, which affected 32 million accounts, shows among others that the hackers were able to correctly crack the passwords based on biblical references, according to Boing Boing. These references include "jesus," "heaven," "faith" and "john316" among others.
Even Bible-based passwords with variants, such as numbers, were also easily cracked by the hackers using the password-guessing brute-force software.
"Jesus" topped the list of Christian-related passwords that were cracked, affecting 21,638 users. Number 2 is "heaven" with 7,222 users, followed by "faith" with 5,230 users.
Collectively, "jesus" was found to be the 30th most common password overall, behind "tigger" (No. 22) and ahead of "football" (No. 45), according to Christianity Today.
Variants like "jesus777" and "jesus143" also gave the hackers little trouble in decoding.
In the list of cracked passwords based on the most common Bible verses, "john316" topped that category with 1,075 affected users.
The ranked lists of the top Christianity-related and most common Bible verse-based passwords from the data breach can be found here.
Using the first letter of each word in a Bible verse to create a password is also considered fairly weak since it is easy for computers to compile a database of all easily memorable passwords that could be constructed in this way, according to Lifehacker.
Christians may find it tempting to use Bible verses for their password, or base their password on a biblical passage, because they've already memorised the text. However, computer security experts say that hackers can always figure out the patterns they're using. They recommend using a password manager and passwords that hackers can't guess.
But how can users create an unguessable or at least hard to guess passwords?
Experts said this can be done by including hard-to-guess letters, numbers, or symbols. Users can also include unrelated words or phrases. "The key is to be unpredictable," according to Christianity Today.
