German Politicians Had STUPID Passwords

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And now they are surprised that they got hacked. German cyber-attack: man admits massive data breach, say police.

1000 “public figures” had their personal data hacked.

[The interior minister, Horst Seehofer] revealed that the hacker would not have been able to gather as much data as he had, if his victims had created more sophisticated passwords.

“Bad passwords were one of the reasons he had it so easy,” Seehofer said. “I was shocked at how simple most passwords were: ‘ILoveYou’, ‘1,2,3’. A whole array of really simple things.”

I don’t know why people use a bunch of simple passwords, and then try to remember them all. I have to remember the PW for my password manager. (It is long.) And it remembers all my passwords, which are crazy long. But hey, I’m not a high-paid government functionary.

[The hacker’s] motive appears to have been a general discontent over the public utterances of politicians and others who he wanted to show up.

That last is according to Holger Münch, head of Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, or the German Federal Criminal Police).