Data security professionals encourage serious consideration be given to password security
21 January, 2010
category: Corporate, Digital ID
A password security study by Imperva released data showing 32 million passwords exposed in the recent Rockyou.com breach. A report by Imperva’s Application Defense Center (ADC) showed that many of the hackings were due to weak commonly used passwords. Examples of these common passwords include: password, 12345 and iloveyou.
“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second—or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva’s CTO Amichai Shulman.
The study found that nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or small passwords and therefore most susceptible to cyber attacks. Companies are also finding that employees who use the same password for multiple online networks are vulnerable to these attacks.
Imperva will host a webinar detailing the study’s findings. Registration is available here.