It’s rarely news that most people use terrible passwords. There are just so many to remember, and really, no one is all that good at remembering completely random strings of letters and numbers. Recently, though, we got a little more data behind this widely accepted fact.

RockYou, a widget service for social networking sites, was recently hacked. The hacker retrieved passwords for 32 million accounts, which were stored in a database as plain text, and posted them online. Security firm iMPERVA took a look at the passwords and found some ridiculous stats. The most common password? 123456. That was followed by 12345, 123456789, and Password. That capital P is definitely important.

iMPERVA esimated that a slow DSL connection could access one account every second using a simple dictionary hack. It’s hard to say whether people would use better passwords on sites that hold more sensitive data, but my inclination would be no. Why add more passwords to remember, even if they’re as simple as Password.

Source: Ars Technica