Daily Archives: October 12, 2015


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A team at WP Engine have conducted an interesting analysis of some 10 million passwords that had been collected from various sources such as leaks and dumps of passwords.   Virtually none of the passwords were still in use so the researchers considered that it was ethical to use the dataset in their research. The analysis highlights that people tend to choose passwords based on defined patterns and what comes into their mind when asked for a password.  So it is not surprising that in the 50 most used passwords, the most common text-based password is the word password itself.  However, the use of patterns does often make guessing passwords very easy, especially for password cracking software such as HashCat which can make up to 300,000 guess at a password per second. Other patterns identified were people adding their year of birth to their name to create a password and an […]

What 10 million passwords reveal about the people who choose ...