If you're a user of Yahoo!, Formspring or LinkedIn, chances are that in the past few months, you've been advised to change your password because of a database hack that's compromised the security of your account.
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Yahoo! was the most recent victim, with more than 400,000 accounts hacked yesterday by a group calling themselves Dirty D33DS. The group published a 17-megabyte file revealing many passwords.
The latest hack raises questions over how safe accounts are — and highlights how feebly many users protect them.
Many passwords are easy to guess, according to software developer Adam Caudill, who analysed the most common Yahoo! passwords on his website. He describes plain-text passwords as "an unforgivable sin".
So what were the ten most common passwords for Yahoo! users?
The most common was "123456", followed by "password", "welcome" and "ninja". In fifth place was "abc123", with easy numeric orders "123456789" and "12345678" taking sixth and seventh place.
Last in the list were "sunshine", "princess" and "qwerty".
According to security expert Mark Burnett, who has compiled a list of the 10,000 most common passwords from publicly available sources, these are the 25 most common:
1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. 1234
5. qwerty
6. 12345
7. dragon
8. pussy
9. baseball
10. football
11. letmein
12. monkey
13. 696969
14. abc123
15. mustang
16. michael
17. shadow
18. master
19. jennifer
20. 111111
21. 2000
22. jordan
23. superman
24. harley
25. 1234567
Experts warn not to use the same password across multiple sites and remember to change them often.
