Password Insecurity: An Analysis of Gawker User Passwords

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal of the stolen user data from Gawker media proves that many users don't take password security very seriously. At all. That data was swiped over the weekend by a hacking group called "Gnosis," who managed to gain access to e-mail addresses and passwords of more than a million Gawker users.

Gawker's sites have been compromised, causing users to reset their passwords to sites such as Lifehacker, Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, and Jezebel. The Wall Street Journal analyzed some of the hacked Gawker data that has been released to find trends in people's password selections. They looked at a sample of 188,279 passwords made public by the group. The list proved that a lot of users chose passwords that were just stupid. The most popular password was "123456," followed by "password." Other foolish choices included "lifehack," "qwerty," "monkey," "letmein," "cheese," "trustno1," and "passw0rd."

Gawker staff members did not think outside the box either. As many as 15 had exceptionally weak passwords. One staffer had his password set to his name, followed by "1." Many others simply used common phrases and words.

Source: PC World