Three 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.
USENET newsgroups report that “123456” was the most popular password among the comprimised Adobe users. About 1.9 million people used the sequence.
Last 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 on USENET 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
If you recognize your favorite password here, it’s really time to pick something else. We encourage all of our ThunderNews members to choose or change to a secure, robust password.
