Last month's hack of 38 million Adobe accounts revealed the weakness of its user authentication system, according to The Inquirer. The massive breach also demonstrated the prevalence of the same bad passwords, though users in general seem to be improving their security choices.
Jeremy Gosney, a security researcher at Scripture Group, obtained the list of predictable passwords and posted the top 100. Of the over 130 million active adobe accounts, nearly two million used "123456" as its password, PC World reported. Going just three numbers further ("123456789") was the second most popular password, but was chosen by a significantly fewer 446,000 users, who might have gone all the way to 10 if such a key existed.
The first written password, "password," was the third most popular on the list and chosen by 345,000 adobe account holders.
Counting numerically and stopping at 4, 7, and 8 all made it into the top 15. Nearly all of the most popular passwords also appeared on PC World's "Worst passwords of 2011." "Password" was number one on that list.
Still, a hacker using this list to crack someone's account would still have to get pretty lucky. The top 20 passwords accounted for only three percent of all Adobe accounts.
When Adobe first reported the hack, it announced that 2 million accounts had been compromised and later adjusted the number to 38 million for stolen login information and as many as 150 million in total (that includes inactive and test accounts), according to PC World. By accessing user's accounts, hackers obtained credit card number, expiration dates, and other sensitive information.
