In October, Adobe revealed hackers had accessed the password data for three million users, along with the source code for several of its products.
The true number of users affected has turned out to be far, far larger. On October 30, Adobe admitted as many as 38 million users had had their data compromised. It now appears 150 million users in total had their account details collected.
You can check whether your Adobe password is on the compromised list here, and change it here. If you used the same password for other accounts, you should change those too.
The breach is yet another instance of a large company taking the financial security and privacy of its users casually. Recent examples include Sony and LinkedIn. Like those cases, Adobe’s passwords were weakly encrypted (those interested in the technical failings can find them here).
No excuses should be made for large corporates who should know better and whose customers deserve better. However, in Adobe’s favour, it’s come to light that plenty of its users took password security as casually as it did.
Jeremi Gosney of the Stricture Group analysed the password data dump, which is now freely available online, and came up with the 100 most common passwords on there.
The hacked database helped him do this more quickly. But essentially, these people had weak account protection regardless of whether or not Adobe was hacked.
Here are the 20 passwords easily found by Gosney. If you use one these, don’t. Download a password manager, and use that to generate random passwords. It’s quicker than typing ABC.
1. 123456 – used by 1,911,938 people
2. 123456789 – 446,162 people
3. password – 345,834 people
4. adobe123 – 211,659 people
5. 12345678 – 201,580 people
6. qwerty – 130,832 people
7. 1234567 – 124,253 people
8. 111111 – 113,884 people
9. photoshop – 83,411 people
10. 123123 – 82,694 people
11. 1234567890 – 76,910 people
12. 000000 – 76,186 people
13. abc123 – 70,791 people
14. 1234 – 61,453 people
15. adobe1 – 56,744 people
16. macromedia – 54,651 people
17. azerty – 48,850 people
18. iloveyou – 47,142 people
19. aaaaaa – 44,281 people
20. 654321 – 43,670 people
Myriam Robin is a reporter for SmartCompany and its sister site LeadingCompany. She has degrees in economics, international studies and journalism. She likes writing about businesses taking risks and doing new things.
