“The most-used password, and the dumbest, remained ‘123456’ and was exposed more than 23 million times”

@happygeek

I’m always banging the password manager drum. There’s a good reason for this, in fact there are millions of good reasons for this: the crappy passwords that are still used, and reused, by way too many people who really should know better. I’m confident that PC Pro readers aren’t among this number, but I bet they have family, friends and work colleagues who are.

It’s not just the quality, in terms of entropy (more of that will follow shortly), that’s problematic, but the quantity as well. Everyone appreciates that there are far too many websites and services that require a login for anyone who isn’t Akira Haraguchi to remember unique password for each. Haraguchi holds an unofficial world record for memorising more than 111,701 digits of pi. That said, even he might succumb to password fatigue, which leads to the security nightmare that is password reuse.

In 2020, researchers at NordPass analysed 275,699,516 passwords that had appeared in breached site credential databases, finding that 56% of them weren’t unique. The only thing that I found shocking about that number is that it wasn’t higher, given