Are you having passwords with "123456," "abc123" or "password"? If your answer is yes, then you’re putting yourself at a high risk of having your account compromised.
It is very easy-to-guess passwords such as "123456," "qwerty," "abc123" and "password" which are used over and over again on accounts, making it extremely easy for hackers to compromise accounts.
An analysis of the more than 440,000 passwords and usernames posted on the web as part of the recent Yahoo! breach has revealed that despite warnings, users continue to use the same easy-to-guess passwords.
Following the Yahoo!breach, Slovakian IT security company ESET posted some “quick statistics” on the hacked accounts and passwords, revealing that just under 1,700 of the hacked accounts (0.38%) had "123456" as their password. "Password," "welcome," "ninja," "abc123," "123456789," "12345678" and "sunshine" followed as the next most commonly used passwords.
"Password," "welcome," "qwerty," "monkey" and "jesus" were the top five most used base words for creating passwords, said ESET.
“Since all the accounts are in plain-text, anyone with an account present in the leak which also has the same password on other sites (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc), should assume that someone has accessed their account,” advised ESET.
According to password management application maker SplashID, “password” topped the list of most commonly used passwords in 2011. "123456," "12345678," "qwerty," "abc123," "monkey 1234567," "letmein," "trustno1" and "dragon" were also in the top ten list for 2011.
If you are concerned that your account was compromised in the Yahoo! attack you can visit security company Sucuri’s online check at labs.sucuri.net/?yahooleak to see if your email account was jeopardized.
Top 10 passwords, with number of times used, found for the compromised Yahoo! accounts according to ESET:
123456 = 1666 (0.38%)
password = 780 (0.18%)
welcome = 436 (0.1%)
ninja = 333 (0.08%)
abc123 = 250 (0.06%)
123456789 = 222 (0.05%)
12345678 = 208 (0.05%)
sunshine = 205 (0.05%)
princess = 202 (0.05%)
qwerty = 172 (0.04%)
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