In 2023, it was reported that '123456' has been one of the most commonly used passwords among the majority of people in India and worldwide. A new report from NordPass, the password management solution company stated that people use the weakest passwords for their streaming accounts in 2023.
Words that refer to a specific location were also found in people's passwords. Internet users frequently search for a city or country’s name for their password, and India is also on the list when we talk about the exception. Many users are using the password like 'India@123' which has been ranking as the high on the country's list.
The report stated that another most widely used security code is 'admin', which is one of the most used passwords which do not bother changing. This was one of the most common passwords used in India at the moment and in many other countries.
Last year in 2022, the global winner 'password' did not leave the Internet users’ choice for choosing a security code. Talking about the Indian users, 'password', 'Password@123', 'Pass@123', and similar variations were used by a wide number of users.
In order to find out about the security codes by Internet users, different platforms, specifically the researchers analyzed a 6.6 TB database of passwords, which exposed various stealer malware, which was considered a huge threat to people’s cybersecurity.
Tomas Smalakys, CTO at NordPass said, "The scariest part is that victims might not even realise that their computer is infected. Bad actors tend to hide malware in well-crafted phishing emails, imitating a legitimate organisation, such as your bank or your company.”
Almost 31 per cent (a third) of the world's population took the most popular passwords consisting purely of numerical sequences, like '12345', '123456789', '000000' and more.
As per the report, as many as 70 per cent of the passwords could be cracked in less than a second, in this year’s global list.
Researchers have further suggested Passkeys as a new form of authentication for better security.
Smalakys said "This technology will help eliminate lousy passwords, thus making users more secure. However, as with every innovation, passwordless authentication will not be adopted overnight.”
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Inputs from IANS
