Not gross as in disgusting, but gross as in LARGE in size or immediately obvious. Back in December a website named rockyou.com had it’s security breached and 32 million usernames and passwords were exposed. Now, a company called Imperva has analyzed these passwords. The 20 most common passwords are interesting. As 11 minutes over at alpha status says here and here, there is no such thing as being unique.
The top 3 passwords are 123456, 12345, and 123456789, with with roughly 290K, 79K, and 77K for those three.
The fourth ranked password was just that password.
Fifth was Iloveyou, followed by princess in sixth. Man would I like to see them women that chose princess as their password.
Seventh was the name of the damn website, rockyou. How’s that for originality?
Eight through Ten were 1234567, 12345678, and abc123.
Eleven, Twelve, Fifteen, Seventeen, and Eighteen were all first names. Dumb.
Thirteen was babygirl. Fourteen was monkey. Sixteen was lovely.
Nineteen was back to numbers with the original sequence of 654321.
And the twentieth most popular password was the equally original qwerty.
Overall these 20 passwords only make up 2.5% of the 32 million total passwords that were exposed. Still, using an automated program, that is a high enough hit rate to compromise anyone’s security.
