In a sobering deep dive into more than 19 billion newly exposed passwords, a recent Cybernews study has confirmed… we’re still terrible at choosing passwords. The report uncovers a global epidemic of weak, reused, and predictable passwords. In this blog, we’ll go over a summary of the findings Cybernews made, and try to uncover why this is still a problem.
One of the most alarming revelations from the study is that a staggering 94% of all analysed passwords were either reused or duplicated. That leaves only 6% of passwords unique. Quite a surprising figure, right?
Keyboard patterns like “123456” continue to dominate, with variations like “1234” showing up in nearly 4% of all passwords. Of course, we can’t forget that the word “password” itself is still holding strong in the top ranks, along with the default “admin”. Hopefully, we’d assume that this isn’t so common in businesses, as they should each have a strong password policy for staff to adhere to. However, individuals are at just as much risk of businesses online, so we should all be setting ourselves the same policy.
The data that Cybernews found demonstrates very old and classic password creation habits:
Thanks to MANY campaigns over the years, it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone knows that having a weak password is bad, so why are we still making them? Here are the two main reasons we can think of:
The truth is, we all know what we should do when making a password. Hackers are getting upgrades for their tools every day, so we need to up the ante, too.
We hope you’ve liked this blog and stick around to see our future releases. We cover everything from recent IT News to knowledge base articles. Stay safe!