While the Ashley Madison hack has proven that our online data is susceptible to attack, it has also exposed just how flagrantly we leave ourselves open to personal hacks by using the most easy to crack passwords for our accounts.
After sifting through the data breached and looking at the passwords used by almost 12m users of the infidelity website, the top three passwords employed by Ashley Madison users to hide their extra-marital affairs were: 123456, 12345, and password.
The rest of the top 100 contain all of the usual gems that cyber security experts consistently tell us to avoid if we want to keep our online profiles safe from unwanted probing. The top 100 are as follows:
The 11.7m profile passwords analysed so far represent almost a third of the 36m ones which were dumped online in August in the far-reaching hack.
Researchers at CynoSure Prime revealed the passwords, showcasing how weak they are at standing up to simple cyber attacks.
Strong passwords should comprise a mix of lower and uppercase letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. By CynoSure Prime showed that nearly 5m of the 11.7m passwords used by the average Ashley Madison user contained only lowercase letters at all:
