Virtua Hacker

You´ll play as a hacker, trying to piece together people´s passwords from data leaks, social engineering and social cues. This´ll hopefully provide a unique (if slightly exaggerated) perspective on how passwords can be broken, and thus on what to do in order for yours NOT to get broken.

In particular, each character you hack in this story exemplifies one particular trait of what makes a password bad.  From their example, anyone should be able to know what not to do!

 On the matter of accuracy, the main purpose of the game is still to teach players what passwords are good and bad, not how they are cracked, so I felt exaggerating some parts of the process would significantly help that purpose (for instance, there are barely any plaintext leaks out there, but using it provides a great introduction into the topic of hashes and password salting).

Also, the sites in the game quite real:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/(HaveIBeenPwned)

https://crackstation.net/(Crackr)

Dictionary attacks are  very much real, and also very much illegal, so I won´t link a method here.

As for my sources, here:

https://www.itpro.com/security/34616/the-top-password-cracking-techniques-used-b...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/consumers/2021/03/01/how-hackers-...