According to leaked data, there’s an alarming trend in the top three passwords of popular sites.
On Twitter, the most common passwords of 58,000 leaked accounts were 123456, 123456789 and 102030.
From 450,000 leaked Yahoo! passwords, the top 3 were 123456, password and welcome.
From 4.6m leaked Linkedin accounts, the top 3 passwords were link, 1234 and work.
It’s quite concerning that so few people take password security so seriously. With Dropbox’s recent security compromise and a growing number of leaks, people should treat their online identity with more discretion and either select more secure passwords or use a dedicated application like 1Password.
Alternatively, browsers and/or operating systems should educate users. Would it be so hard for vendors to prompt users with weak or identical passwords from other websites (especially when many browsers preserve that data)?