Two recent events illustrate that most people do not protect their data very well online.
On October 4, Adobe reported that its systems had been penetrated by attackers who stole 38 million user accounts and passwords.
BBC reports that "123456" was the most popular password among the comprimised Adobe users. About 1.9 million people used the sequence.
This week security experts from Spiderlab said they discovered a trove 2 million stolen social media passwords from all over the world in a criminal cyber network and analyzed that.
Spiderlab reported that "there were more terrible passwords than excellent ones, more bad passwords than good, and the majority, as usual, is somewhere in between in the Medium category."
After comparing it the 2006, Spiderlab concluded that "people still choose comfort over security."
Here are the 20 most popular passwords in the hands of the Adobe hack (Spiderlab's top 10 is similar). Users with these sequences are essentially inviting hackers to take data in very litte time:
- 123456
- 123456789
- password
- admin
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 1234567
- 111111
- photoshop
- 123123
- 1234567890
- 000000
- abc123
- 1234
- adobe1
- macromedia
- azerty
- iloveyou
- aaaaaa
- 654321
As BI's Julie Bort noted: "If you recognize your favorite password here, it's really time to pick something else." Here are some tips on choosing strong passwords.
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