Researcher at Avast Says: Hackers Use Weak Passwords Just Like Us

Hacking has always been thought of as something which is technical and too advanced for normal users. For many of the regular users of PC who use it either to browse internet, connect with friends in social networks, watch videos, save photos and documents etc., hacking is nothing less than rocket science. But according to a researcher at Avast Virus Lab, it is interesting to know that “hackers use weak passwords just like the rest of us”.

A recent post was made in Avast official blog, by Antonin Hyza, researcher at Avast Labs, who found the fact that hackers use weak password. In the post he posted, “I looked at 40,000 samples of hackers’ passwords and found that nearly 2,000 were unique and 1,255 of those were in plain text. Another 346 passwords were easily cracked from MD5 hashes, because they were shorter than 9 characters. That gave me a total of 1,601 passwords and 300 hashes.”          

“About 10% of the passwords were beyond normal capabilities of guessing or cracking. Of those, I found words as long as 75 characters, probably generated by a computer. Some of them were in long sentence form mixed with special characters such as lol don’t try cracking 12 char+. Too bad it was stored in plain text.”

According to Hyza, the passwords used by hackers had a 90 percent chance that they could be a normal password; some with numbers. He also said that there were also some passwords that didn’t used characters from English Keyboard. He also laid out a report showing the percentage values of passwords that used only character or numbers, special characters, and a combination of all. According to the table 58 percent passwords had only ‘a to z’ characters, 9 percent had ‘0 to 9’, and 20 percent had a combination of ‘a to z’ and ‘0 to 9’. Also the average password length is 6 characters.

Meanwhile, attackers using weak passwords have no connection with frequency of attacks. A PC without antivirus and internet protection solutions is still at risk. It is necessary to install comprehensive security solutions, like those of Avast and VIPRE, immediately. Simply install them and keep your data protected. However, if you face issues with them dialing Avast customer service phone number is a thing that you should do.

There few good support companies like SupportMart, which provide reliable and effective antivirus support like VIPRE Antivirus technical support, Norton support, AVG support etc. Reach their experts and avail much needed help.