Stop me if you've heard this one before. Last year, billions of credentials were exposed due to thousands of data breaches. Many of the companies that were hacked didn't tell anyone until months after the fact, and the most common password exposed during these breaches was … 123456.
I know, right? Same old story.
At this point, I'd love to tell you that there was something new and exciting about these breaches. In some ways, there is: The poor security used by many large companies is under greater scrutiny than ever before. But in other ways, these exposures reinforce the importance of the advice that's been around for years: Choose a strong password and, where you can, don't use a password at all.
The most succinct summary of the scale of data breaches in 2018 comes courtesy of SpyCloud, a firm specializing in security analysis and anti-account takeover solutions. It reports that in 2018 it was able to recover 3.5 billion credentials from 2,882 breached sources and managed to decrypt 87% of the passwords contained in this data.
A deeper analysis reveals more troubling factors. One is that it's not clear that many of the "data breaches" reported in the press last year were data breaches at all. In some cases, companies merely released data that they had permission to re ..
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