BlackBerry dominates the North American smartphone market, enjoying almost 40 per cent market share. A 20 per cent worldwide market share isn’t exactly a bad thing, too. The total subscriber base for the BlackBerry platform is more than 50 million users.

In brief, here is the "problem": for years (I think starting from Windows 3.0 released almost 20 years ago), the passwords are being masked as you type them (in most programs what have any kind of password protection, and an operating system itself), i.e. replaced with asterisks or black circles. What for? To prevent the password from being read by someone who stands behind you.

The Register reports VAServ.com has been attacked and now more than 100.000 websites have gone forever because of company’s poor password policy. The attackers are unknown and Rus Foster, (former?) VAServ.com director claims that anonymous messages indicated nonexistent passwords. I wouldn’t like to sound sarcastic but their description at AboutUs.org reads quite funny now, what do you think? 

ElcomSoft is launching a survey intended to collect more information on how people handle their passwords, which remain a major way for user authentication. Whether you are ElcomSoft customer or haven’t seriously thought about password security, we hope you will answer our questions.