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Football fans looking to show their support for their nation at Euro 2020 have been warned not to let their passions leak into their cybersecurity practices.
Security firm Authlogics examined a database of more than a billion recently cracked passwords and found that the vast majority of users had football-themed login credentials.
A large amount of passwords was simply a user’s favorite club, or a small variation on the team name, with the embarrassing simple password “football” used in over 350,000 occurrences.
Poor passwords
The Authlogics report examined the Password Breach Database, a repository of more than a billion unique clear text passwords that have been involved in recent breaches.
Digging into the database, the company found that over a million passwords were football-related, many of them lacking in detail or imagination, meaning they could easily fall prey to hackers or scammers.
Liverpool turned out to be the password of choice for football fans, occurring 215,842 times, ahead of Chelsea (172,727), Arsenal (151,936) and Barcelona (131,090).
“This staggering number of football-associated passwords poses an obvious problem,” wrote Authlogics’ Kate Wotherspoon in a blog post examining the results. “These breached passwords are obviously insecure due to the breach itself, but they also speak of serious problems for other accounts owned by the compromised individuals.”
The company points out that having passwords that are so easy to guess can also be a serious concern if users reuse the same one across multiple accounts. All it takes is a site or organization to be compromised so that hackers can potentially access the logins on all other accounts.
The company is now advising football fans to check the security of their passwords immediately and is encouraging the use of symbols or patterns to make sure their login details are as effective as possible.
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