This Is the Country With the Most Leaked Passwords

Who would believe that the average person has 100 passwords? A recent study shows that figure is accurate. Passwords are, for many people, hard to remember. How many letters, numbers, and special symbols people must use for passwords varies from website to website, email to email provider, computer to computer, and phone to phone. No wonder many places that require a password have a box labeled “forget your password”, so people can begin the password selection process again.

There are reams of advice about how to remember passwords, which passwords are safest, and which are most likely to be hacked. Should people use their names, their birthdays, the names of their friends, the name of the first car they ever owned, or their grandmother’s maiden name? Experts say those may be too easy to guess, or for software that steals passwords to detect.

Password leaks are fairly common and can be huge. Recently there was one such leak–of 8.4 billion passwords. That is close to the total number of people in the world.

To determine the country with the most leaked passwords overall, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from a report on passwords published by NordPass, which compiled the data in partnership with what it describes as “independent researchers specializing in research of cybersecurity incidents.” The researchers evaluated a 4TB database and devised a risk index, sorting countries into three tiers — low, medium, and high. Per capita and total numbers of leaks span a period of approximately ten years.

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There’s not much a person can do to avoid database breaches, but for general password security internet subscribers should avoid easy-to-crack passwords and try to use unique passwords for each online account. Regularly changing passwords, though inconvenient, can add an extra layer of security.

The country with the most leaked passwords is Russia. Here are the details:

> Leaks per capita: 19.9
> Total leaks: 2,867,917,611
> Risk level: High

It is worth noting that Russian has a population of 144.1 million people.

Click here to read about the countries with the most leaked passwords.
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