Default Credentials Are Making Automated Cyber Attacks A Lot More Frequent

You might think that the various people you would come across on the internet would all be real individuals that exist in the physical world, but with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that 70% of online traffic actually comes from bots. While you might not come across many of these bots in your day to day internet usage, they are used quite frequently to conduct automated cyber attacks.

Automated attacks are of particular concern to business because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making them lose access to their financial data among numerous other things. However, these businesses are not practicing good password hygiene or online security protocols, and that has resulted in these automated attacks being a great deal more successful than they could otherwise have been.

The most common successful attacks occur when some kind of a default password has been used. Some services give you a randomly generated default password that you are supposed to change when you log into the account, but despite that these companies don’t seem to realize how important this practice can be with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Among the widely used credentials that have been stolen in the past year are usernames like nproc with the password being exactly the same, something that most hackers would have no trouble figuring out through simple brute force processes. Default usernames like user are also really common, with passwords like 1, x, 1234 or some other sequence of characters being used.

Bulletproof created a honey pot in order to figure out the most common credentials used in these attacks, and their findings are a real cause for alarm. Basic password hygiene can dramatically reduce the number of successful cyber attacks that businesses would have to go through, and the time has long past for them to start taking that seriously. These kinds of credentials might not even need to be hacked at all because they are so easy to guess.



Read next: Malware and Phishing Attacks for Smartphones See Massive Year on Year Increase
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