Identity Theft News

Password security a tall order for many web users

Friday, January 22, 2010

A recently released study from tech researcher Imperva showed that the most popular password among users whose accounts were compromised in the recent RockYou data breach was as follows: 123456.

Experts say that weak passwords are one of the Achilles' Heels of modern network security, since most people tend to use the same easy-to-guess password on multiple sites. Over half of the accounts that Imperva analyzed from the RockYou case chose only alphanumeric characters, which made them much easier to break into.

As it happens, 123456 was also the most popular password among Hotmail users whose accounts were similarly compromised in a large-scale phishing attack that took place in October 2009. "Password" was also one of the most common passwords discovered by Imperva in the RockYou incident.

IT security professionals can take several steps to help beef up password security at their company, including the creation of rules governing password length and content (i.e., no five-character passwords, must contain at least one number and at least one special character) and making sure that no password can be discovered by a simple dictionary hack.