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”.