In just the last few months, I have reported on confirmed lists of stolen passwords being made available on the dark web and in criminal forums that have risen from 800 million to 1.7 billion and even as high as 2.1 billion, mainly thanks to the rise and rise of infostealer malware attacks. But a new report has just blown even those shockingly large statistics out of the water with an analysis of 19 billion such passwords that are available online right now to any hackers who want to seek them out. The takeaway being that you need to take action now to prevent becoming a victim of the automatic password hacking machine epidemic.
The 19 Billion Exposed Passwords Hacking Problem
Imagine having access to 19,030,305,929 passwords that were compromised by leaks and breaches over the course of 12 months from April 2024 and involving 200 security incidents. Imagine that only sources where email addresses were available for consumption alongside the stolen password were included in this massive database. Oh, and forget about including any of those word-list compilations, such as RockYou, that regularly do the rounds but are about as useful to a criminal hacker as a chocolate router. Finally, get to grips with the fact that this dataset only includes passwords that have become publicly available in criminal forums online. Once you digest all of this, you can appreciate how huge, in all senses of the word, this really is, especially to any hacker with criminal intent.
The analysis, published May 2 by the Cybernews research team, makes for truly eye-opening reading. It’s so wide-ranging and security-scary in equal measure that it’s hard to know where to start, so the beginning seems as good a place as any: password laziness and reuse. Of the 19,030,305,929 passwords that ended up exposed online, only 6% of them, or 1,143,815,266 if you like to be precise, were unique. Switch that around to 94% of them being reused across accounts and services, whether by the same or different people is moot, and you can see why the average cybercriminal gets very excited about the hacking potential such lists provide.
Now throw in that 42% of the passwords were short, way too short, being only 8-10 characters in length. That now opens up the hacking potential to brute force attacks as well as credential stuffing. Ah, yes, and it just keeps getting worse; 27% consisted of only lowercase letters and digits, no special characters or mixed case. Sigh.
Act Now To Mitigate The Password Hacking Threat
According to Neringa Macijauskaitė, an information security researcher at Cybernews, “the default password problem remains one of the most persistent and dangerous patterns in leaked credential datasets.” The analysis revealed that there were 53 million uses of admin and 56 million of password, for example. Changing these is one quick way to help mitigate against hackers, as Macijauskaitė said, “attackers, too, prioritize them, making these passwords among the least secure.”
Not reusing your passwords, ever, not at all, is another prime mitigation recommendation. “If you reuse passwords across multiple platforms, a breach in one system can compromise the security of other accounts, creating a domino effect,” Macijauskaitė warned. Meaning that even without any existing system compromise, attackers are able to exploit common password patterns in their hacking exploits. “Attackers constantly harvest the latest credential dumps from exposed info-stealers and recently cracked hashes available publicly,” Macijauskaitė concluded. “These fresh datasets enable waves of highly effective credential-stuffing attacks, often bypassing traditional security defenses.”
