Investigation of 32 million breached passwords reveals old tendencies
By Bryan on January 21, 2010 | Computer Security, password, statistics, rockyou.com breach
Imperva security experts analyzed 32 million passwords cracked in Rockyou.com incident. The results of the study are not surprising: people still don’t care about their security enough to come up with strong passwords. Researchers have even compared the results to Unix password study done back in 1990; the variety of passwords remained almost the same.
The problem with weak password is that it breaks easily against automated cyber attacks. This type of attack tries all the most common dictionary words and most common passwords one by one. Since large group of people uses the same easy to remember passwords such as ‘123456’ or ‘password’, it doesn’t take much effort to break into an account even when the attack is manual. The automated attack which is much more common makes things even simpler. According to security experts, in the Rockyou.com case a hacker could gain access to one new account every second due to simplicity of passwords.
Security researchers insist on using difficult to guess passwords. You might be careless about losing your email account but many people use the same password for several accounts and losing the one password brings lots of information in jeopardy. And even more trouble is around when the same password is used in workplace.
The most commonly used passwords:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
11. Nicole
12. Daniel
13. babygirl
14. monkey
15. Jessica
16. Lovely
17. michael
18. Ashley
19. 654321
20. Qwerty
Read the full study report .
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