Justifiable Paranoia

Last December, a hacker acquired the password list for RockYou by exploiting a SQL injection vulnerability which revealed the usernames, email addresses and passwords of a whopping 32.6 million users. And worst of all (besides the company’s attempt to first cover up the incident, then downplay it), the passwords were stored in plain text! Not that hashing would have slowed an attacker down much. Most users’ passwords consisted of short, common words or were all-numeric.

I ranked the 14.3 million unique case-sensitive RockYou passwords by frequency and reviewed the top 2,000 uniques (accounting for 4.7 million users’ passwords) to identify the top passwords by category, some of which are shared below.

Eminem is more popular than Jesus as a password for RockYou users? Who knew? 7,241 uniques of “eminem” versus 5,866 for “jesus”. When case-sensitivity is ignored the same holds true. 7,594 uniques for 7 variations of “Eminem” versus 6,449 for 9 variations of “Jesus”.