Imperva’s Application Defense Center (ADC) analysed the strength of the passwords in a report, Consumer Password Worst Practices, to help consumers and website administrators identify the most commonly used passwords they should avoid when using social networking or e-commerce sites.
The report identifies the most commonly used passwords (in order): 123456; 12345; 123456789; Password; iloveyou; princess; rockyou; 1234567; 12345678; abc123.
“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks; with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second, or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva’s CTO Amichai Shulman. “The data provides a unique glimpse into the way that users select passwords and an opportunity to evaluate the true strength of passwords as a security mechanism. Never before has there been such a high volume of real world passwords to examine.”
Some key findings of the study include that the shortness and simplicity of passwords means many users select credentials that will make them susceptible to basic forms of cyber attacks known as ‘brute force attacks’. Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password is 123456.
For enterprises, password insecurity can have serious consequences. “Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like ‘123456’,” said Shulman.
“The problem has changed very little over the past 20 years,” he added, referring to a 1990 Unix password study that showed a password selection pattern similar to what consumers select today. “It’s time for everyone to take password security seriously; it’s an important first step in data security.