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How secure are your businesses passwords?
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Maidenhead, U.K. – September 28, 2009 - How secure are your businesses passwords?
Victims of a phishing scam which led to passwords and usernames belonging to 1000's of Hotmail accounts being posted on the interent used easiliy guessable passwords.
Many passwords used easily guessable strings of numbers or letters, ananalysis of 10,000 of the leaked passwords, by US security researcher Bogdan Calin, CTO of security company Acunetix reveals.
The most common Hotmail password was 123456, which appeared 64 times, followed by 123456789, which appeared 18 times. Other common passwords included alberto, iloveyou and 000000.
Hotmail is not the only place where weak passwords are used. Many small businesses do not operate a password policy to enforce certain password characteristics like minimum length, not allowing the users firstname or lastname to appear, not allowing a previously used password to be used again and setting a password expiry date.
These basic steps can help prevent a malicious attacker gaining access to your network. Businesses these days give employees access to their email remotely by using Webmail, a feature included with Microsoft Exchange Server. Easyily guessable passwords are often used to try and gain access to a system before using more complicated techniques and this recent attack just shows how easy some companies are making it for the hacker's.
To have someone look at your network and advise on security concerns could save you a lot of headache and expenditure. Contact us to see how we can help you, help yourself.
For further information please contact:-
news@centricsystems.co.uk or call 0845 2266031