The most common hacked LinkedIn password? 123456, of course

25 May 2016

If you have a LinkedIn account, change your login details immediately. Actually no, take a moment and think first, then change it. Something many people have yet to do.

In 2012, LinkedIn was hacked, with 6.4m passwords stolen – at least that’s what the company claimed. Now there are reports that a few more people had their passwords compromised, up to 111m more, to be precise.

LinkedIn responded to the news of the leak last week with a statement from its chief information security officer Cory Scott, who said the company was now “aware” of the full extent of the hack.

Leakedsource claims to have obtained the list of 167,370,910 accounts (email and password), with 117m of those including passwords – the rest, presumably, accessed their LinkedIn via other social media accounts.

The combined email and passwords are apparently up for sale on the dark web, with the list of the most frequent passwords hacked the most eye-catching.

We’ve been here before, many times, but finding awful passwords remains entertaining.

The top 10 passwords:

  1.  123456  (753,305 instances among the breach)
  2.  Linkedin (172,523)
  3.  Password (144,458)
  4. 123456789 (94,314)
  5. 12345678 (63,769)
  6. 111111 (57,210)
  7. 1234567 (49,652)
  8. Sunshine (39,118)
  9. Qwerty (37,538)
  10. 654321 (33,854)

For its part, Linkedin has gone through every account on its books that predates 2012 and, if any of the users have failed to change their passwords since then, their passwords have now been invalidated.

“We will soon be sending more information to all members that could have been affected, even if they’ve updated their password.”

Nothing new

This is all part of a consistent theme, as predictable passwords are used in abundance.

At the end of each year, Splash Data publishes lists of the most common passwords found among security breaches. For the last few years, 123456 and password have held top spot.

Add a number here and there and you can get three of the next most common, with qwerty rounding out the six most common.

The wonderful Have I Been Pwned? resource created by Troy Hunt is worth a gander if you think you could have been hacked.

Number image via Shutterstock

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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