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Unbelievable: "123456" Most Common Hotmail Password

Posted 10/07/09 at 12:00:02 PM  by Paul Lilly

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Over 10,000 Hotmail email accounts were leaked to the web earlier this week as the result of a massive phishing scam, which may not have taken a whole lot of effort. After all, if you're going to choose "123456" as your password, compromising your account is like shooting fish in a barrel.

In this case, there were 64 said fish in a barrel full of over 10,000 compromised Hotmail accounts, making it the most commonly used password of the bunch, according to a researcher who combed through all the posted accounts.

About 42 percent of the passwords consisted of lowercase letters from "a" to "z," and just 6 percent secured their email accounts by mixing alpha-numeric characters. And almost 2,000 passwords were only six characters long (the longest was 30 characters).

An interesting side note - a bunch of the top 20 passwords were Spanish names, which might suggest that the victims were of Spanish origin or lived in Spanish-speaking communities, Wired.com reports.

COMMENTS:14
TAGS: Security, email, Hotmail, Password
COMMENTS
avatarTitle of the thread is a

Submitted by Pillslanger on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 6:29am

Title of the thread is a little misleading.  That was only the most common password in a very small section of a community.  Ordinarily, this might still be statistically valid if it were a random sampling, but they were all stupid enough to fall for a phishing scam.  So of course you are going to have a high percentage of weak passwords, look at the group of people you are examining.  Frankly, I would have guessed more than 64 in 10,000.

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avatarSome good Helmet

Submitted by Black Lable 69 on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 5:01pm

Ah the joys of lazy stupidity

 

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avatarThat's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.

Submitted by 5150cd on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 10:14am

I've got the same combination on my luggage!

/Registered to say that, it was worth it.

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avatarBeat me to it bro. But yeah,

Submitted by AntiHero on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 10:54am

Beat me to it bro. But yeah, i did some server administration in my past, and people REFUSE to have passwords. They contineto pine on with statements like "I have too many passwords" or "why can't i just use my first inital and last name?" well that's not really helpful is it? It's kinda defeating te purpose of a password, which is like having a key. I tend to use this as an explanation: "Would you make the lock to a safe 0 0 0 just so you didn't have to turn the dial?" and tey usually nswer "well no, but this is different" well no it isn't. Why in hell would you leave you accounting information on a secured server, if you won't password it, or have a simply crackable password. That's just saying "imbezzle" on a neon sign.

I don't like Microsoft, I associate with it.

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avatarreally?

Submitted by versak on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 10:00am

no one used the word "password". hmm.

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avatarI'm pretty sure they won't

Submitted by compro01 on Mon, 10/12/2009 - 9:59am

I'm pretty sure they won't allow you to use "password" as the password on hotmail.

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avatarAnd people wonder why their

Submitted by I Jedi on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 10:00am

And people wonder why their accounts are taken from them.

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avatarSo Simple...

Submitted by bingojubes on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 9:52am

I guess if it worked in Spaceballs, it works everywhere.

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avatarI admit it...

Submitted by HeartBurnKid on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 9:17am

I have a Hotmail account with a 123456 password.  However, in my defense, I don't actually use that account for anything I actually care about; it's just for registrations on sites I don't plan to go back to and I suspect might spam me.

In fact, if I actually sign up for a site with that account, it's usually a username that I'll put on Bugmenot when I'm done.

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avatarHey, me too!

Submitted by Havok on Wed, 10/14/2009 - 4:18pm

 I did the same thing! I found out someone's password was 123456 and then signed up for newsletters and-

 

 

CLICK.

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avatarTrue..

Submitted by 1337Goose on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 4:11pm

I wouldn't say that my hotmail password is easily hackable, but it's very weak compared to my Gmail password. True that it depends what you use it for. No point in securing your crap rigorously.

~Goose

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avatarI wonder how many of the

Submitted by mattman059 on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 12:41pm

I wonder how many of the 10,000 Hotmail accounts were used for junk...I know mine is...but it wasnt compromised that im aware of (havent been to it in like a year - Thanks Gmail)....

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avatarNo kidding.

Submitted by Win7Maniac on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 12:31pm

Same here, my username (email) is junk (different domain), my password is junk, and the email that goes there is junk. Hackable, but really, who cares?

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avatari do the same thing. Use

Submitted by adamjy12345 on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 9:54am

i do the same thing. Use another E-mail account for websites that will send spam. Just one way to keep things clean.

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