Study reveals the top ten most used passwords

A study analysing 32 million passwords recently exposed in the Rockyou.com breach has been published. In order of frequent occurrence the most commonly used passwords are:

1.      123456

2.      12345

3.      123456789

4.      Password

5.      iloveyou

6.      princess

7.      rockyou

8.      1234567

9.      12345678

10.  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 1,000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva 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.”

For enterprises, password insecurity can have serious consequences. “Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like ‘123456’,” said Shulman. “The problem has changed very little over the past 20 years. It’s time for everyone to take password security seriously; it’s an important first step in data security.”

The report can be downloaded at:  www.imperva.com/ld/password_report