SECURITY RESEARCHERS looking at the behaviour of those people who were caught by the Hotmail phishers have found out the most common passwords.
Since more than 10,000 people were hacked and their password details revealed on the world wide wibble, it gives researchers a good population study for the use of passwords.
Bogdan Calin of Acunetix grabbed the passwords before the data was wiped.
He found that "123456" was the most commonly used password, appearing 64 times.
Just under half the population used only lowercase letters from "a" to "z" and only six percent mixed alphanumeric and other characters.
The top 20 passwords were Spanish names, such as Alejandra and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were Hispanic. This also suggests that people tend to use either their own name or the name of someone they know.
Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters long, which made them easy to hack. However the longest, "lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo" was revealed in the phishing scam so the owner's care was wasted.
The Inquirer. Oct 8, 2009.
Posts
10 comments:
The passage is actually showing us,not only the most common password in the world,but also how mighty the Internet is, even the longest password that contain 31 characters was revealed.The reason for people using such a short password as 123456 is because they underestimated the danger of the hackers. They all knew "1","0" only,but with that, user's privacy will easily be invased. Therefore, we should be careful when we are thinking of any password.
It is true that our password should be in mixed alphanumeric and other characters. Why will 123456 be the most commonly used password? As people may think that the minimum length commonly implemented in forum systems is 6 characters, and it is easiest to count to 6 using numbers.
Moreover, it’s easy for hackers to get in our account if we don’t log out the account and delete history when using computers in public areas. Provided that someone has accessed to MSN, there are softwares that can be used to check the account numbers and passwords in computers which have been entered MSN previously.
123456 has once been my email password since it is easy to be memerized.(but now i must not use this kind of silly password since there are too many private documents in my emails. In my opinion, the forums and email suppliers should restrict the users to set a password which contains both numbers and english letters for keeping the chance of being hacking as low as possible.
For the password "123456" it is common because it is easy to type in and remember .In the past ,i had also use this password during the trade with others about some online games account .
In fact ,using this kind of password are very danger ,because people which know your account ID can easily guest your password .Now ,the internet market are very large ,we can buy things in internet by using internet banking .So it is important to choose a password which is not easy guest by others .
But if the password are too ling such as"lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo" ,it is also danger ,beacuse you may forget such a long long password ,as a result choosing a good password are also a kind of knowledge .
For me ,when i set up an account and password ,i will write is down on a paper and keep it carefully ,so that then i forget the information ,i will not get any loss .But on the other side ,the paper should keep very very careful ...
123456 , i can't believe it was the most commonly used password . In my mind , i think phone number and birthday are common password .
Besides , if the passwords were only 6 digits , it is easy to hack . Specially for 123456 or abcdefg .
On the other hand , if the passwords were 30 digits , that's too long , i believe it is hard to remember it . Thus , 8-10 digits is preferable .
123456 are widely used for its easy to type and remember. password, i got lots of them, using at the same time, but i can claim that my memory will only become more worse when time passes. many people say that having such a password is unsecure, and can be easily hacked by hackers. but have you ever learn form the hackers prospective? hackers will try their best to explode your password even if your password is "such difficult". cracking password only require more computuing power and time, as a matter of fact, difficult password was not that secure if you dont even know what a good password is. the next thing is guessing password, it will only be your friends or someone that you know, if the information in your account wasnt that important and together with your bad memory, the cost of using 123456 will be lower. i am not supporting to use 123456 as your password, but does it really matter to use?
After i read this article, i smiled. Although i'm not use "123456" as my account password, i just use my self-phone or the telephone of my home numbers as passwords.
I think that people use these kinds of passwords is that they are afraid that they forget the passwords. Like me, I have tried to use the "letter and number" mixed passwords. As the results, after a few days, I forgot it. So i think it is the reasons why people will use "123456" as their passwords.
i forgot to mention my class...
i am 6ab1 (40)
In my opinion, I think setting a password as 123456 has its pros and cons. Of course, it is easy to memorize it. Therefore, I used to use this as my password for emails and forums. However, the security is extremely low. When you register an acoount of a forum, if you set a password as 123456, it will tell you that the safety of this is low. Thus, I know that it is not a secure password. I will not use this as my password anymore.
People are always worried that they may forget their password. I think that is exactly the reason why they chose such a "no-brainer" password. It's easy to remember and quite difficult to forget. However, it drills down to the problem why we have so many problems with security, either physically or in the cyber world.
Post a Comment