Passwords are one of the oldest Internet and software security tools

Over 70% of people use same passwords for different accounts. Source: pixabay.com

Thales has revealed that more than 70% of staff reuse passwords for both work and personal accounts. As a result, a threat actor could abuse an employee’s credentials to access other apps and sensitive customer’s data.

In fact, 81% of breached involved use of weak or stolen credentials.

According to the report, people tend to pick easy-to-hack passwords because of the trouble they have with remembering passwords.

As to the most popular password choices, ‘12345’ and ‘password’ are still on the top. An analysis of more than 5 million leaked passwords found that 10% of people used one of the 25 worst passwords. Besides, 7% of enterprise users had extremely weak passwords.

The research also highlights the benefits of passwordless authentication. It replaces passwords with other methods of identity validation, enhancing the levels of assurance and convenience. It is easing the login experience for users and overcoming the inherent vulnerabilities of text-based passwords.

Thales forecasts that 60% of large and global enterprises along with 90% of midsize employees will implement passwordless authentication methods in 50% of cases by 2022.

We’ve reported that a Turkish computer engineering student Ata Hak??l has analyzed over a billion breached credentials from the Internet. The study reveals that the most common password is 123456. It covers roughly 0.7% of all the passwords, which is nearly 7 million times per billion.

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