Password Hacking: Many Are Using Social Media Names, Let’s See Which Ones Are Popular

Hacked passwords are full of nuggets, and some seem to find their inspiration directly from social networks. Enough to offer pirates some tasty moments.

This is a rather surprising report that we have come across and which concerns, once again, the famous passwords. These are still today the main protection and authentication tool on the Internet available to Internet users and mobile users around the world. Analysts from Specops Software, a Swedish company specializing in online security solutions, explain to us that they have discovered many times the names of social networks in databases with compromised passwords.

“LinkedIn”, a password that has the wind in its sails

Do you like LinkedIn and do you like spending time on this social network? So why not just choose “LinkedIn” as your password? It seems so obvious after all! So obvious that the name of the social platform dedicated to professionals appeared 114,000 times in the list of 800 million compromised passwords analyzed by Specops Software. This may seem like a drop in the bucket to you, but it’s almost twice the capacity of the Orange Vélodrome in terms of the number of people who have, and this is only a minimum, chosen the Windows group network as password.

LinkedIn is also on the podium of these applications found in leaked passwords. The tool now has 875 million users, which also makes it one of the 10 most used social platforms in the world, just Facebook Messenger and TikTok.

In the first two positions, we find QQ, a Chinese platform ranked 10^e rank of the most popular social networks in the world in 2022 (with nearly 600 million active users), followed by Xing, which is a bit like German LinkedIn and which has tens of millions of users.

Bad habits die hard

Behind QQ, Xing and LinkedIn, we find Snapchat (or “Snap”), Instagram (or “Insta”), Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Twitter and Weibo. Very original passwords. ” Instead of choosing a complex password, many users settle for a simple word, often from pop culture or something familiar to them. These bad practices endanger the security of organizations “, rightly recalls Noé Mantel, product specialist at Specops.

In general, the choice of passwords remains a chore for many users, and this can be understood, given the number of services, applications or sites used by one and the same person. Often, they are not aware of the existence of the alternatives without passwords… or simply cannot access them!

65% of people admit to reusing the same password on several accounts, as Google already indicated in 2018. And most studies or articles published since then revolve around this percentage, proof that if awareness is strong, this it is still too ineffective to hit the bull’s eye with a larger part of the population.