Simple passwords, hackers' delight: study
21 Jan 2010
Computer users seem to be taking reports of security breaches, over the years, as also the recent attacks, on Google's email-service with a huge lump of salt, say security experts.
According to a study of accounts of 32 million people whose accounts were hacked at a social networking site RockYou suggests that full twenty per cent of web users still prefer to leave the cyber equivalent of a key under the door by choosing simple, easily guessed passwords like ''abc123,'' ''iloveyou'' or even ''password'' to protect their data.
The study revealed that as many as 1 per cent of the victims were using ''123456,'' as their password, followed by ''12345,'' ''123456789? and ''Password,'' in that order. ''iloveyou'' came in at no. 5.
According to Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, which makes software that provides protection against hacking, people prefer to use simple passwords due to a human genetic flaw. He said the company had seen the same patterns since the 1990s.
What was even more disturbing according to Shulman was that about 20 per cent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.
They say what this meant was that hackers could easily break into many accounts by just trying the most common passwords and thanks to the widespread availability of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.