Massively? For every 3 digits you look at, they're only blocking about 26 out of 1000 possible values. Factor in that there are 4 starting points to apply the restriction to, and you get roughly 10% of passwords being blocked. That's only a sixth of a bit of entropy being lost. Barely anything.

so 741963 would pass? Not sure how that rule your stated actually functions, I am probably over thinking it.

I am curious what simple pattern people will adapt to once you eliminate simple sequences. It has got to be predictable, as in someone could put math behind it.

Any run of three characters in sequence, forward or reverse, is marked as invalid. 123 876 432 would all mark the whole password as invalid, even if they only take up half the string. Yours would pass though, yes.

His is two vertical runs along the keypad. The forbidden ones are horizontal runs. That's why it's stupid. Any modeling of passwords humans would generate for use on a keypad should forbid 741 by the same logic that forbids 123.

My guess (with nothing to back it up) is people will start moving into paterns of 963 852 741 or the reverse since they're easy to type on the numpad without really remembering the values.

edit: On second look, that's exactly what you did in your example.

Date of birth probably. Now half of their passwords has 19xx in the same position.

I'm of the opinion that everybody should be given public and private key at birth.

It's called name and social security number :)

But those are both public

Demons have name and secret name. They figured it out.