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Phishing Scam Reveals Weak Passwords on Hotmail Accounts

Posted by Kim Mays Oct 7, 2009 9:40:26 AM

According to V3.co.uk, the recent hack of Hotmail accounts didn't take much effort. Security firm Acunetix analyzed the accounts that were attacked, and most used simple passwords -- the most common of which was "123456."

 

Acunetix's Bogdan Calin found that 42 percent of user accounts had lowercase alphabet-based passwords, while 19 percent used only numeric passwords, and only 6 percent used combinations of numbers, letters and other characters.

 

Calin said:

 

"My impression is that these passwords have been gathered using phishing kits. Even more, the phishing kit used most probably was badly designed. I think it just returned error messages after grabbing the credentials."

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