123456
password
12345
12345678
football
qwerty
1234567890
1234567
princess
1234
login
welcome
solo
abc123
admin
121212
flower
passw0rd
dragon
sunshine
master
hottie
loveme
zaq1zaq1
password1
If you just saw one of your passwords in this list, stop reading this and change it now. Given that this list makes up about 10% of all passwords in use, it is rather concerning. In 2016, cybercrime prevention spending was $81.6 billion. This is expected to increase to over $2 trillion in 2019. So what areas do these hacks affect? Are you personally affected, or is it just large companies?
In May of 2017, the ransomware WannaCry, a software that encrypts your documents and unencrypts them for a fee, spread through thousands of users. Although the concept is not novel, the sheer size of the attack stood out. One of the affected victims was the UK National Health Service. The reason for their infection was not that WannaCry was a state of the art software, it was simply because they were running outdated software. Another program, amongst many others, called Petya, also wreaked havoc in central Europe. Besides causing harm to individuals, many of Ukraine’s public sectors were affected, leading to major disruptions.
Not all damage is done through hacks, some are also due to negligence on the company’s behalf. An example is the improper storage used by a company named Deep Root. They improperly stored the information of almost 200 million US voters on a public Amazon server. Although this information was not abused, the fact that it was publicly accessible violates dozens of privacy laws.
Finally, some of the hacks that probably influence us the most, are political hacks. Although countries have been hacking each other for a long time, the recent hacks of the DNC and the Macron campaign did not go by unnoted. It appears that not only are our companies, private information and money not safe, but our governments are not invulnerable to such attacks either.
Hey Loïc, interesting post. It surprised me to read that 10% of online users have such easy passwords. Whereas i’m the type of person with super long and complicated passwords, I can still relate. It can be annoying how websites ask you to change passwords frequently for higher security or force you to use at least 1 capital letter, 1 number and 1 symbol. Do you know anything about the frequency of passwords used for different online accounts of one individual? I must not be the only person who cannot remember too many passwords and thus uses one passwords for multiple accounts. Also, it simply is much more convenient to choose 123456, if the you believe in or care about being hacked.
Usually people reuse passwords a lot, but this brings another danger: if LinkedIn gets hacked and you have the same password for it as for your gmail, facebook etc, then you are completely vulnerable. This vulnerability is not related to your password strength, but rather whether one of your passwords can be used to deduce another.
For more info I would recommend watching these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-RbOKanYs