Study On Passwords Shows People Still Use Breached Passwords - Olmec Skip to main content

Study On Passwords Shows People Still Use Breached Passwords

By August 28, 2019May 16th, 2022Cybersecurity

Google recently released a large-scale password study that will probably give every IT manager in the country heartburn. The results of their study indicate that a disturbing percentage of users continue to use passwords after they’ve been warned that those passwords have been compromised.

One of the most common tactics hackers employ is called ‘password spraying.’  It’s a simple technique.  The hackers simply try several compromised passwords (even if they’ve been floating around the Dark Web for months) thinking that a surprising percentage will still work.  Google’s study confirms the hackers’ beliefs to be true.

Right now on the Dark Web, there are more than 4 billion passwords known to be compromised.  The scope and scale of the problem is staggering. Worse, the users who have compromised accounts are, as a rule, slow to do anything to mitigate the danger.  According to the results of the study, only 26.1 percent of users who saw an alert indicating a compromised password bothered to change it.  Barely one in four.

Even when users did bother to change their passwords, 60 percent of the time, the new password was found to be vulnerable to a simple guessing attack. Although in fairness, 94 percent of changed passwords wound up being stronger than the previous one.

To collect the information, Google relied on a newly offered Chrome extension called Password Checkup, which it claims is superior to Firefox’s Monitor and the “Have I Been Pwned” website.

The company contends that these other solutions could be exploited by hackers, summing it up as follows:

“At present, these services make a variety of tradeoffs spanning user privacy, accuracy, and the risks involved with sharing ostensibly private account details through unauthenticated public channels…For example, both Firefox and LastPass check the breach status of user names to encourage password resetting, but they lack context for whether the user’s password was actually exposed for a specific site, or whether it was previously reset.

Equally problematic, other schemes implicitly trust breach-alerting services to properly handle plaintext usernames and passwords provided as part of a lookup.  This makes breach alerting services a liability in the event they become compromised (or turn out to be adversarial).”

Jason Manteiga

Jason J. Manteiga, Vice President of Olmec Systems, has been part of the company for over the past 20 years. He believes that having a great work environment and supportive team, is the ultimate key to success. Since being in the IT realm for over 25 years, Jason, along with Olmec Systems, has been on the Inc. 5000 “List of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies” and Channel Futures MSP 501 “Top Managed Service Providers in North America,” along with other awards and nominations. Jason earned his Bachelor Degree in Information Systems from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He also holds certifications in Microsoft MCSE, VMWare VCP, and Cisco CCNA. In his spare time, Jason is a contributor for The Center for Social & Legal Research (Privacy Exchange) and a member of the Morris County Chamber of Commerce. His hobbies include cycling and kayaking. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife, two daughters and son.