DarkOwl’s Password Data Shows Common Weak Password Patterns
Summary
DarkOwl reports that its dataset contains billions of email addresses and passwords, with common patterns including short passwords, years, “qwerty” and sequential numbers. The article recommends unique, long passwords and MFA.
Key points
- DarkOwl says it has collected over 8.68 billion email addresses, 5.46 billion of which include a password; it reports 57% of those addresses include a plaintext password.
- The most common password length in DarkOwl’s data is eight characters.
- The dataset includes over 707 million passwords containing a year string; “123456,” “123456789,” “qwerty” and “password” also appear frequently.
- DarkOwl reports that 518,566,724 passwords in its dataset are hashed, with MD5 and SHA-1 the most common.
- The article warns that reused credentials can enable credential-stuffing attacks.
- Recommendations include using unique passwords of at least 16 characters, avoiding predictable patterns, using a password manager and enabling MFA for important accounts.
Article Details
- Topic
- Password strength, leaked credentials, password hashing, and password hygiene