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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.
Links:
[1] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/paul_lilly
[2] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/10000_hotmail_accounts_compromised_phishing_campaign
[3] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/10000-passwords/
[4] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/study_emails_are_filled_with_lies
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/proof_email_scams_still_work_woman_loses_400k
[6] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/email_0
[7] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/hotmail
[8] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/password
[9] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/security
[10] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/news
[11] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/login?&commentfragment=comments_top_anchor