There’s an epidemic of weak passwords being reused by folks, and we’re nonetheless utilizing lazy patterns like 123456, which makes it simpler not just for cybercriminals to crack them however result in “dictionary assaults” and safety breaches, in line with a research by Cybernews.
Over 19 billion passwords have been uncovered by greater than 200 knowledge breaches and leaks since April 2024, and they’re accessible to anyone on-line, the research famous.
The research analysed a complete of 19,030,305,929 passwords from breaches or leaks that occurred over the previous 12 months, with just one,143,815,266 (6%) of passwords recognized as distinctive.
Duplicate And ‘Lazy’ Passwords Widespread
Analysis discovered that 94% of passwords are reused or duplicated, and 42% of customers select passwords with 8–10 characters, with eight being the most typical. This comes regardless of Web customers being beneficial to have a 12-character password, however sadly, they select ones which can be simpler to recollect.
Lazy passwords like “password”, “admin” and “123456” are nonetheless continuously used regardless of warnings. The truth that “1234” seems in over 4% of all passwords—greater than 727 million passwords—is no surprise. Including two extra digits to it, making it “123456” leads to 338 million passwords that use it. Since 2011, “password” and “123456” have been probably the most extensively used passwords, as per the research.
The second most frequent factor in passwords was folks’s names. When Cybernews cross-checked the dataset with the most well-liked names of 2025, it discovered there was 8% of names had the probability of being utilized in passwords.
‘Dictionary Assaults’
Information revealed that 27% of passwords have been made up totally of lowercase letters and numbers. Even practically 20% of distinctive passwords contained no particular characters however solely a mixture of capital and numeric characters. This will increase their susceptibility to dictionary and brute-force assaults.
Cybercriminals additionally make entries reminiscent of ‘password’ (totalling 56 million) and ‘admin’ (totalling 53 million) their major goal, preying on folks’s predictability.
With folks utilizing passwords which can be weak, and reusing them time and again, cybercriminals leverage credential dumps from publicly accessible info-stealers to trigger credential-stuffing assaults.
At the same time as cybercriminals misuse fashionable password patterns even within the absence of a compromise, reusing passwords throughout platforms can have a cascading impact, permitting a breach in a single system to jeopardise the safety of different accounts.
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