19 May 2022

The passwords most used by CEOs are startlingly dumb

A recent cybersecurity report shows how immensely idiotic many CEOs and business owners can be, considering the strength of their chosen account passwords. Imagine entrusting the livelihood of hundreds, even thousands of employees to someone who uses '123456' or 'qwerty' as a password.

The research comes from NordPass password manager which identified back in 2020 that the general public's most commonly used passwords were sequential numbers like '123456', 'picture1', and yep, you guessed it: 'password'.

The more recent research sample consists of 290 million cybersecurity data breaches around the globe, and denotes the job level of those affected. Turns out, when it comes to CEOs and other high-ranking businesses execs, their password choices are much the same as the general public, although many often feature names. Tiffany was spotted in 100,534 breaches; then there was Charlie with 33,699; Michael was found 10,647 times; and Jordan, 10,472 times.

The research is pretty worrying, and makes it painfully clear that most data breaches don't happen because of some profound cyber hacking initiative; around 80% are down to people choosing really poor passwords.

Read the above? Now - how to do it properly: 5 Top Tips to pick a secure password.

www.pcgamer.com


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