When life gave him 153 million leaked Adobe accounts, complete with emails, encrypted passwords and password hints, engineer Ben Falconer made a crossword puzzle. A pathetically easy crossword puzzle.
As the nice folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun point out, the first thing you should do before playing Adobe Crossword is to check to see if your account was one of the ones compromised (it probably was) and reset your password. Seeing your own "secure" combination displayed in crossword form is sure to take away from the enjoyment of the game.
Once that's taken care of, see how long it takes you to guess the hints in the XKCD comic-inspired game.
Falconer used only the 1,000 most popular passwords for Adobe Crossword, and the answers to the puzzles past 1-100 are only guesses, but they are damn good guesses. Not that anyone was really trying. Some of these password hints are just bonkers. Here's six across from the first puzzle, a six-letter word.
food; mouse; dairy; cheddar; yellow; fromage; swiss; yum; favorite food; queso; yummy; Food; smelly; usual; mice; cheesey; mouse food; chedder; gouda; milk; dairy product; crackers; ch; pizza; nickname; cheese1; fav food; dog; c; yellow food; edam; cheesy; poop; fave food; eseehc; brie; smells; same; normal; ham; smile; moo; mmmm; mmm; lol; cow; che; american; wisconsin; tasty
If you find your password in the puzzles, then it's a sure sign that you need a better password. If you find your password in the first puzzle, you're probably someone else who's stolen that person's identity.