Italian: a Difficult Language? Not for Hackers!

The researcher calculated how many passwords were discovered after one thousand attempts: Italian ranks second among the easiest languages to breach, with as many as 7.2% of passwords decrypted, behind only Indonesian.

“Incredible,” someone may think, “for once Italy is at the top of a ranking!” Beyond this unenviable record, however, a reflection is needed: the password is often the only barrier protecting our digital identity, and too often in the name of convenience (“I always use the same little word otherwise I forget it”) we give up security.

A recent article in The Economist revealed that many people still use passwords that even a child could crack, such as “123456” or “password”.

The purpose of the research is not so much to make us adopt Chinese or Korean keywords, apparently the safest languages, but to identify users who are generally more careful. There may in fact be reasons why Italian is a little easier to decrypt than other languages: for example, the fact that it uses only 21 letters rather than 25, or that almost every Italian word ends in a vowel, limiting the number of possible variants. These characteristics of our language, however, are certainly not insurmountable obstacles for anyone who wants a secure password.

Assuming that “mamma” or “pizza” are statistically a little easier to guess than “mother” or “wurstel”, you could easily make life harder for the hacker of the moment without resorting to exotic words, by adding numbers or punctuation marks combined with alternating uppercase and lowercase letters. Try a nice “ARC!P£L$G=” and you will see that no one will breach your account! (Example: “arcipelago” in uppercase with numbers in place of letters).