An investigation analysing 32 million password has revealed that the world’s most popular passwords can be easily cracked by hackers using automated attacks. The investigation, by security firm Imperva, came about after RockYou, one of the world’s largest application developers on Facebook, was hacked.

Imperva said that nearly 50% of the 32 million passwords studies were names, slang words, dictionary words or sequences such as consecutive digits or adjacent keyboard keys. Incredibility, the most common password is ’123456′.

The remainder of the top 10 passwords used by RockYou subscribers include ’12345′, ’123456789′, ‘Password’, ‘iloveyou’, ‘princess’, ‘rockyou’, ’1234567′, ’12345678′, and ‘abc123′. The firm said the simplicity of these password makes users who choose a simple string of characters “susceptible to basic forms of cyberattacks known as brute force attack”.

“Everyone needs to understand that the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated attacks: with minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second, or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva.

“The data provides a unique glimpse into the way that users select passwords and an opportunity to evaluate the strength of passwords as a security mechanism. Never before has there been such a high volume of real-world password to examine.”

For enterprises in particular, simple and easy-to-crack passwords can lead to serious security breaches. “Employees using the same password on Facebook that they use in the workplace can bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy-to-crack passwords such as ’123456′”, added Shulman.

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