I have a lot of passwords to get me onto various online sites and services, but I only need to remember one: the complex and hard to crack one that unlocks my encrypted password store. Not everyone is as paranoid as I am it seems, and many fall neatly into the dumbass category if a recent analysis of 32 million consumer passwords is anything to go by.
A data security company called Imperva undertook a detailed analysis of breached consumer passwords, and the very fact that they ended up in the 32 million breached passwords database suggests that they were not brilliant to start with. However, to climb to the very top of that list by way of being the most 'popular' and hence most commonly cracked is a true measure of dumbassness.
And so, without further ado, are the top ten most commonly used dumbass passwords to be avoided when signing up for social networking or e-commerce sites:
- 123456
- 12345
- 123456789
- Password
- iloveyou
- princess
- rockyou
- 1234567
- 12345678
- abc123
“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second—or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva’s CTO Amichai Shulman. “The data provides a unique glimpse into the way that users select passwords and an opportunity to evaluate the true strength of passwords as a security mechanism. Never before has there been such a high volume of real-world passwords to examine.”
According to the analysis, nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). Dumbass! But the list should come as no real surprise, our award winning security writer here on DaniWeb warned about the crappiest passwords just over a year ago and back then many of the same dumbass passwords showed up in his top 20 list.
