[ Thanks to Yama
for this link. ]
“Strong passwords are your first step in securing your systems.
If a password can be easily guessed or compromised using a simple
dictionary attack, your systems will be vulnerable to hackers,
worms, Trojans, and viruses.“Trojan, virus, and worm authors have had great success
attacking systems with weak and/or default passwords. Take
IRC/Flood Trojan for example. McAfee’s virus profile states that
IRC/Flood has over 120 variants and has infected over 60,000
machines in the last 30 days. IRC/Flood succeeds by checking for 22
different different easy to guess admin passwords (variants vary).
Unfortunately, there are a lot more where IRC/Flood came from,
W32/Tzet.worm, W32/Random.worm, and W32.HLLW.Gaobot.gen are in the
wild just to name three…”