Don't panic, but the next time you head out and decide to flip on the Personal Hotspot feature on your iOS device, you might want to think about changing the password to something else.
ZDNet reported Tuesday that the seemingly random passwords iOS generates for the Personal Hotspot feature may not be quite as secure as users might expect.
In fact, researchers at Germany's University of Erlangen were able to crack the passwords in less than a minute, all because Apple's defaults use a combination of a "short dictionary word followed by a series of random numbers."
The problem stems from the limited number of words being used -- and where they originate from.
"This list consists of around 52,500 entries, and was originated from an open-source Scrabble crossword game," the researchers reveal. "Using this unofficial Scrabble word list within offline dictionary attacks, we already had a 100 percent success rate of cracking any arbitrary iOS hotspot default password."
While the actual dictionary word can be cracked in under a minute, it took another 49 minutes to brute force the remainder of the password -- by which time many users may have finished their latte and headed home anyway.
Curiously, iOS appears to be using only a small subset of the 52,500 dictionary entries available to it, instead basing the temporary password on only 1,842 words, which makes hacking your Personal Hotspot easier than it should be.
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(Image courtesy of AppleHeadlines.com)