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Millions of Facebook and Google users warned to make urgent change after ‘worrying’ find

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Hundreds of thousands of people are continuing to use the same weak security passwords worldwide despite countless warnings to change them, cyber security experts discovered.

Cybernews’s research team looked at 56 million breached and leaked passwords in 2022 and found an alarmingly high number of people are still using easy to guess passwords including swear words, keyboard sequences, cities and animals for sites such as Google and Facebook.

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A worrying one per cent of passwords investigated ticked the recommended requirements of both upper- and lower-case characters, numbers and special symbols.

Researchers found the classic “123456” was used as a password in a 111,417 cases. Other popular choices included “password”, “12345”, “usr” and “qwerty”.

Profanities were also popular choices, with “ass” topping the list of crude choices at 292,869. “F***” was detected 79,564 times while “s***” had 336,388 uses.

Many people working in IT were also warned about using passwords that are too easy for threats to guess.

Default passwords used by workers with system access privileges included 16,981 cases of “admin”.

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