In more recent security news – a database of 450,000 user names and passwords of Yahoo Voice users was stolen and produced to the internet. Unfortunately for Yahoo Voice’s users, the passwords weren’t encrypted. Lucky for us, Anders Nilsson, a Swedish security expert, saw this opportunity to analyze the password data to see what behaviors people have. What he found was a bit mind-blowing and he decided to share a few notable results; the most notable ones being ‘123456’ and ‘password’; even a few hundred users with one character passwords. The whole of his results can be seen here.
Lessons we can glean from this, aside from the essential need of password complexity, is not using the same password for any two logins. If these Yahoo accounts happened to use the same e-mail address and password for their Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, or Bank accounts, they could be compromised.