Tons of hotmail, msn, and live.com passwords have been recently exposed online, about 10,000 of them. Researchers who were able to study the leaked passwords found out that many are still using very weak passwords. These accounts were said to have been genereted via phishing scams targeted mostly to Latino’s because majority of the passwords had spanish names.
Based on the study, 42% of the password used were all lower case, only about 6% were using passwords that mixes alphanumeric and other characters. As said, there were a lot of spanish names used as passwords like alejandra and alberto, suggesting that the phishing attacks were propably targeted to Latino communities.
The passwords were posted over to a clipboard site Pastebin.com. The list has already been removed by the site owner but Bogdan Calin of Acunetix was able to grab a copy.
Based on his findings, the most common passwords used were “123456″ and “123456789″. The longest password used was 30 characters long “lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo”. Average passwords were 6-9 characters long, 8 being the most.
Accoording to the data gathered, a big majority of users are still using very weak passwords. If you are still one of those using weak passwords for your email, then you might want to consider changing your password now! A more secured password would contain both letters and numbers, with a mix of capital and lower case letters, it’s also an added security if you use special characters.
