Data security breaches have become common place over the last 10 years, so much so that as an industry we have almost become immune to them.
However a recent study carried out by a Turkish Security researcher, Ata Hakcil, on password reuse found after analysing over a billion credentials that "123456" was the most commonly used password!
That equates to 1 out of every 142 passwords on the internet with an occurrence of 7 million times in the analysed data set.
Some other mind boggling and interesting stats revealed that:
Out of 1 Billion passwords only 169 million were unique
The average password length was 9.48
29% only used letters
13% only used numbers
The top 1000 passwords account for over 6% of all passwords
Interestingly a large of number of the passwords were found to have low entropy, even though they appeared to be strong passwords, which leads the researcher to believe that there may be a password manager out there producing passwords with low entropy as default.
The full details of the research can be found at the following Github link:
