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recently (June 2024) conducted a large-scale study on passwords used by everyday people. To be precise, the cybersecurity firm found on the Dark Web to see how they would by hackers and scammers. Given how it’s a cybersecurity company publishing its findings, it’s no surprise that the results aren’t promising. Out of the it was able to grab, it was able to get through them at the following speeds: That only adds up to ~77%. What about the rest? Kaspersky said that only 23% (44 million) of the passwords it found are “resistant”. These passwords require over a year to crack via brute force or smart guessing algorithms. Another Kaspersky finding showed that examined contain a word that can be , which the company claimed would significantly reduce a password's strength. So, don't do that. The following are the most popular sequences. Are you one of them? Kaspersky said only of all passwords have a “strong combination”: they contain a non-dictionary word, lower and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols. However, 39% of these passwords can be figured out by algorithms in . As it turns out, there’s a relatively low entry barrier to getting the tools needed to run password-guessing algorithms. Kaspersky said that attackers do not require deep knowledge or expensive equipment to succeed. The bad actor only needs “a powerful laptop processor” to guess passwords with (lowercase or digits) in just .  Most smart-guessing algorithms are also capable of replacing some commonly used substitutes, such as replacing “a” with the “@” symbol or “1” with an exclamation mark. Here are a few tips, courtesy of Kaspersky and us: If you want to protect your online and digital accounts better, consider reading seven-part series. Part 4 specifically discusses that users can act on. Source: ,