At 09:10 PM 7/8/96 -0500, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:

Ben Holiday wrote:

...

If you have access to a shell, and to the news spool, you can generate some quick lists by hopping into the directory of any newsgroup that interests you and doing:

cat * | tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq > my-big-ol-wordlist

With most unixes that will generate an alphabetized list of all the unique words in your source text, converted to lowercase. I've had some problems with tr on a few machines, however. Adding a '-c' after 'uniq' will tell you how many times each word occured (useful for grepping out words that appear too infrequently, or too frequently) ..

Actually I am fairly sure that your selection of words will be mediocre at best. There are words (such as nethermost, insatiable, insufferable) that are almost never used in news.

If the purpose is for use with "Crack" or some similar program, it might be better than you would think. You won't get the "unusual" words, but you will also get the words in common usage that do not appear in dictionaries. (Such as fnord, jedi, killfile, and the like...) You will also get alot of proper names, which may have been used as passwords. The idea is that words in common usage may be more likely to be used as passwords. Another thing to look for when choosing dictionaries/wordlists for crack is not sticking to english. If you have a userbase that is known to have a certain percentage of people of a non-english background, you will want to find lists of words from that background. (I had a sysadmin asking me about Yiddish and Hebrew wordlists for just that reason.) These can be a bit harder. (Especially for unusual languages.) But knowing your userbase can make all the difference in what it might take to crack the passwords from the outside. --- Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon "Microsoft -- Nothing but NT promises."