Passwords consisting of simple sequences of letters and numbers became the most popular passwords in Runet in 2021. Combinations qwerty123, qwerty1 and 123456 take top lines of the rating, the fourth place goes to a11111 and fifth place to 123456789. It is noted that among Cyrillic passwords, the most common are "password", "love", "hello" and "natasha".
Analysts have studied 35.5 billion unique pairs of logins and passwords, including 250 million new ones. According to their data, only 3.5 percent of passwords can be called complex, and 16.5 percent are long.
According to Alexei Drozd, head of information security at SerchInform, users risk losing access to their pages and personal accounts on various resources using easy passwords in the absence of two-factor authentication. He warned that it's especially dangerous if fraudsters gain access to a person's main mailbox. Then attackers will have an opportunity to take possession of more information, resetting the password from other services.
For example, passwords are checked for security every time users enter them to access Yandex services: a database of 1.2 billion compromised credentials is used for this purpose. The same check is carried out in VKontakte. Google said that they are advised to think up a password length of at least 12 characters, such as a quote from a movie or a line from your favorite poem.
Sergei Ivanov, Director of Product Strategy at T1 Group, said that the most common password-guessing technique is called brute force, which has long been used by cybercriminals. It is when anthologies of popular passwords and word directories are attached to the software code. He specified that a combination of six Latin letters of the same case can be found in 31 seconds, assuming the search speed of 10 million passwords per second. It would take only 95 minutes to crack a password consisting of six symbols (letters in different registers and numbers). If the password contains 10 symbols, it will take 2.5 years.
