Recently, I was testing my modest “pentest” skills on my personal WI-FI network. Following the classic methodology, I performed a deauthentication attack on a device connected to my “access point”, captured the WPA2 key exchange, and tried to “crack” the password using a “wordlist”. For the sake of the exercise, the password used was alarmingly simple. Despite that, I was unable to find it.
That’s when reality hit me: the usual “wordlists” available online contain little or no French and/or Québec vocabulary, since most of them come from American and international breaches. During discussions on some Discord servers (Hackfest), I noticed that very few French-language references were indeed available and that there was a desire to create such a password list. Our group, w0lfd3n, a team of professionals and enthusiasts who are mostly from Québec, came together around this idea. We seized the opportunity to found an official group in order to get involved in the cybersec community. This project was a kind of catalyst for the group and an extra motivation to explore methods and skills that were, for most of us, still new, i.e. GitHub. We hope the project will make a positive contribution to the Québec cybersec community.
We are pleased to present the public repository w0lfd3n’s quebec_wordlist. This list is extracted, for the most part, from passwords found in several public data breaches, all related to Québec domains (public institutions, private sector, etc.). It has several potential applications, i.e. a “wordlist” for John The Ripper and Hashcat, or simply a list of passwords to avoid. You can combine good password discipline with this list to avoid using weak and compromised passwords.
We also recommend using a password manager such as BitWarden or KeePassXC to avoid reusing the same password multiple times. We plan to make constant changes and additions to this list, and we are of course open to any external contributions that meet our criteria.
You can contact us at [email protected] .
Photo credit: worldsdirection - CC BY license
