According to a study carried out by Imperva, the security of our accounts on the Internet is in serious danger. One in five users still uses the digital equivalent of leaving a key under the doormat: an easy-to-remember password like “abc123” or even “password .”
To reach this conclusion, Amichai Shulman and his campaign examined the list of 32 million passwords that an anonymous hacker stole last December from RockYou , a company that makes programs for users of social networks such as Facebook or MySpace . The list was posted for a short time on the Internet, long enough for hackers and security companies to download it to you.
The analysis revealed that about 50% of users used names, slang, dictionary words, or trivial passwords, such as consecutive digits or adjacent keys . Specifically, almost 1% of the 32 million people had chosen “123456” as their password. Other popular vulnerable passwords are “123456789”, “12345”, “1234567”, “password”, “iloveyou”, “princess”, “rockyou” and “abc123”.
This implies that “with minimal effort, a hacker can access a new account every second or 1,000 accounts every 17 minutes,” according to those responsible for the study. In other words, if your password is “123456” or “password”, you are ” hacker meat”.
