List of hacked passwords reveals '123456' is most popular

tech.yahoo.com

12 points·gscott··13 comments

The percentages on password-use percentages on this article shouldn't be taken too seriously. More than 200K accounts were compromised -- of those 200K, about 27K passwords were recovered. Those 27K passwords were recovered because they were able to be looked up on a md5 lookup website.

Amazing that this fact is not mentioned in the original article nor the writeup! Totally changes on how one should analyze the numbers.

If I recall correctly, the ~27k were not the easiest to lookup, but just the first 27k that the attacker looked up. He said he just got bored after that many.

Recently a niche programming-oriented website called phpbb.com

Ouch. They didn't have to say niche.

thats amazing! i've got the same combination on my luggage!

Stuart Brown of the blog Modern Life did a good article on this almost 3 years ago, revealing trends in passwords used in the UK. http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/top-10-most-com...

I wish he still blogged, he had an amazing signal-to-noise ratio, posting frequency, and article quality.

It used to surprise me that something like "asdfasdf", which is probably the easiest/fastest to type password (at 6+ digits) never shows up on these kinds of lists. But I guess when most people in the world are typing words out one letter at a time, it really doesn't make a difference.

But they do, see Robert Grahams full article:

> 14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard, like "1234," "qwerty," or "asdf."

Were these passwords being stored as plain-text?

No, they were stored as unsalted MD5 hashes.

phew, I'm relieved. I always use '12345' instead...

I outsmart them all. I use "1234fivesix".

ha, that's why I always use 011235!

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