[ISN] Most Common Hotmail Password Revealed!

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/10000-passwords/

By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
October 6, 2009

A researcher who examined 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords 
that were recently exposed online has published an analysis of the list 
and found that "123456" was the most commonly used password, appearing 
64 times.

Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from "a to z"; 
only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters.

Many of the top 20 passwords used were Spanish names, such as Alejandra 
and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were in Spanish-speaking 
communities. Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters 
long. The longest password was 30 characters -- 
lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo.

The 10,000 passwords and user names, believed to be booty from a 
phishing attack, were posted over the weekend to the clipboard site 
PasteBin. The site owner has since removed the list, but Bogdan Calin of 
Acunetix grabbed the passwords before it disappeared.

The list included only online account addresses that began with "A" or 
"B," suggesting that the list was only part of a larger cache of 
credentials. On Tuesday, the BBC reported that it had viewed a second 
list of more than 20,000 account credentials that included Gmail, Yahoo 
and AOL accounts, and that Google had uncovered a third list containing 
an unknown number of accounts.

[...]


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