Security News > 2021 > March > Credential exposure trends: You need a better password

For users with more than one password collected last year, researchers found that 60% of the credentials were reused across multiple accounts, making them ripe for account takeovers and password spraying attacks.

This password reuse rate, which is unchanged from last year, reflects how easy it is for an attacker to use one stolen password to compromise more than one account.

Outdated password complexity requirements have complicated the issue by providing people with a false sense of security when they recycle a favorite password with a few simple changes, like capitalizing the first letter and adding a 1 or ! at the end.

Even the strongest hashing algorithm means little when users make weak or common password choices.

"As smart consumers, we need to take personal responsibility for setting strong, unique and complex passwords to protect ourselves because, as the data shows, we can't expect websites and companies to do it for us."

Most common passwords - As usual, the most common password found was "123456," followed by "123456789" and "12345678." "Password" and "111111" showed up more than 1.2 million times each.

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