London: A data security firm has unveiled the ten most commonly used passwords on the web.
To reach the conclusion, Imperva analysed around 32 million passwords that had been exposed in a recent hack of the RockYou website.
Last year a hacker had breached the site's company database, gaining access to the unencrypted usernames and passwords of all its 32 million users.
Now, after studying the breach the firm has come up with a list of the most commonly used passwords which website users should avoid, reports The Telegraph.
“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,” said Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technical officer.
“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’,” he added.
“The problem has changed very little over the past 20 years. It’s time for everyone to take password security seriously; it’s an important first step in data security,” he said.
The ten most commonly used passwords analysed in the study were:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123.
ANI
First Published: Thursday, January 21, 2010, 15:49