By: Corey Nachreiner Postred on 9/16/2014
Long live the password (as long as you use it correctly along with something else).
Over the past years, months, and weeks, industry has suffered from a surge of data breaches, which have leaked a wealth of user credentials onto the underground market (albeit, often hashed credentials). Some of the fallen victims include Adobe, Target, Michaels, and Home Depot. Even Google was not immune, though the leak reported last week of some 5 million username and password combinations consisted of mostly stale or older credentials that don't actually work.
The news isn’t good or surprising. The principal reason is fairly obvious: People still suck at using passwords!
If you follow these password database leaks, the top used passwords read like a list of bad practices. They include passwords that are too short or too common, and thus very easy to guess or crack. Totally irresponsible passwords like “password1,” “123456,” and “qwerty” still are horribly common. Furthermore, correlating password leaks has shown that people still tend to use the same password across different resources. All this is why many pundits have proclaimed that the password is dead.
DarkReading/ full article here/ http://www.darkreading.com/operations/in-defense-of-passwords/a/d-id/1315719?
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