Over time passwords have become a ubiquitous part of our digital activities. They’re something we expect to create and manage for all of our accounts, and yet with all of our online accounts, having unique passwords can be difficult. Despite this, they remain the most common way of locking unauthorized persons out of our systems and away from our sensitive data. The data held in our digital accounts is of great value to threat actors everywhere. This is why attackers are perfecting their techniques and using sophisticated tactics to conduct account takeover attacks using compromised passwords.
Compromised passwords pose a significant threat to the security of organizations and individuals and as time ticks on, the list of exposed passwords continues to grow at an alarming rate. In fact, according to the Verizon Data Breach report, 81% of hacking-related breaches leveraged either stolen and/or weak passwords.
We’re currently experiencing a data breach epidemic. According to the 2019 MidYear QuickView Data Breach Report, 4.1 million records were compromised in the first six months of 2019. According to Help Net Security, in 2019, a total of 7,098 reported breaches exposed 15.1 billion records.