Hopefully,this man isn’t typing ‘admin’ here (Picture: Getty Images)
123456 is,in the password world,about as lazy as it gets.
All passwords are certainly not created equal,and some are way more common – and predictable – than others.
Cybersecurity experts are urging people to update their ‘lazy’ passwords after analysing 19billion passwords exposed by data breaches.
‘We’re facing a widespread epidemic of weak password reuse,’ explainedNeringa Macijauskaitė,information security researcher at Cybernews.
‘Only 6% of passwords are unique,leaving other users highly vulnerable to dictionary attacks.’
‘Simple,predictable default’ passwords like,well,‘Password’ were among the most common passwords the Cybernews team encountered.
‘Attackers,too,prioritise them,making these passwords among the least secure,’ Macijauskaitė said.
‘Even without any compromise,hackers can exploit common password patterns.’
What can make passwords act less like an unbreakable lock are cases.
Almost a third (27%) of passwords analysed consisted of only lowercase letters and digits,making them highly vulnerable to ‘brute-force attacks’.
This is when hackers systematically shove every possible combination into your login screen using an automatic software that rapidly generates guesses.
There’s also the risk of ‘credential stuffing’,when hackers obtain usernames and passwords that were leaked elsewhere and reuse them to log in.
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