Research Reveals Many Fortune 500 Companies Use Extremely Weak Passwords, Can Be Hacked Instantly

It is now common knowledge that if you want to stay safe online, you need to come up with a strong password that no one would be able to guess. Companies like password and Google have started offering their customers random password generation services so that highly unique and impossible to crack passwords can be created because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making it far less likely that a user might end up getting hacked thereby causing a problem for the company in general.

Hence, it is utterly astonishing that employees of multi billion dollar companies that are listed on the Fortune 500 use things like “password” or a series of sequential numbers as well as various simple and easy to guess words and phrases. This is a lack of password hygiene that would have been considered substandard decades ago, let alone in this modern day and age where everyone knows about the importance of online security. This revelation has come from a report that was released by NordPass, and it indicates that hackers would have absolutely no trouble hacking into an employee’s account.

About 1 out of every 5 passwords that were analyzed used some variation of the company’s name which also indicates poor password hygiene. A single employee getting compromise could result in hackers gaining access to the whole system and mistakes like this end up costing companies millions of dollars a year. Steps need to be taken to rectify things like this as they are giving hackers with increasing levels of influence the power to do a lot more damage.

The study also highlights that when comparing with others the human resources industry had the highest unique password, standing at 31 percent.

Creating unique and difficult to crack passwords should be a standard aspect of working for a company, but clearly not enough emphasis is placed on this all in all.


Photo: Getty

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