Another Breach Reveals Weak Passwords: Will We Ever Learn?

10.06.2012
It has been 18 months since more than 188,000 passwords for subscribers to were snatched by hackers and posted to the Web, but consumers don't seem any more inclined to protect their passwords now than they were then.

An of the most common passwords found among the millions posted to the Net after digital desperadoes clipped them from reveals similarities between them and the favorites of Gawker users.

For example, consecutive numbers are popular with both groups. Two of the top ten passwords for LinkedIn members were 1234 and 12345, while three passwords in the Gawker top ten were 12345, 123456 and 12345678.

Gawker's top ten also had a non-consecutive number, 111111, and an alpha numeric consecutive, abc123. Other top ten passwords for the site were less obvious, but not very strong either: lifehacker, monkey, and consumer.

LinkedIn members tended to stay away from old standbys of lazy password pickers like password and qwerty -- both in the Gawker top ten -- and focused on business (job and work were in their top ten), sex (sex and ilove) or religion (god and angel).

It's obvious that really short passwords were acceptable to LinkedIn, as evidenced in "the" making its members' top ten list. Using the name of a site for a password is also a common practice among hasty password pickers. But we all know how busy business people can be and apparently many LinkedIn members didn't have time to complete the name of the site in the password field and just used "link" instead.