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Phished or not, leaked passwords show lazy habits
- From: Brian Warkoczeski
- Date: Fri Oct 09 11:31:40 2009
Phished or not, leaked passwords show lazy habits
by Elinor Mills
October 8, 2009
www.cnet.com
It's still unclear exactly how 20,000 passwords discovered on the Web
recently were stolen, but the finding reveals much in the way of
people's password habits: some of us are lazy.
Several lists of passwords from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other
accounts were discovered and reported on earlier in the week. While,
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are blaming phishing, a researcher at
ScanSafe thinks password-stealing malware on computers could be the
culprit, which would mean that more than just the Web e-mail accounts
may have been compromised.
More on that later. First, let's look at what an analysis of the leaked
passwords reveals.
Security researcher Bogdan Calin did a statistical analysis of the list
of more than 10,000 Windows Live Hotmail passwords and wrote about his
findings on the Acunetix blog. He discovered that the most common
password was "123456," used for 64 of the passwords. In second place was
"123456789," used for 18 of them. Also, 42 percent of the passwords used
only lower case letters.
For rest of the article, see:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10371499-245.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
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