I think more than four thousand people are not dumb enough to set '123456' or 'password' as their password. I assume that a good percentage of that would for throwaway accounts and the users would be aware of the implications.
If i want to post a comment on a lifehacker blog post, there is a decent chance that i give some random string and 123456 as the username and password. This is the case when i know that i won't be using it again. True that an email is associated with the login credentials but still this might be true for many of those passwords.
Yup, I think one of those "password"s is mine. I truly couldn't care less about the security of my Gawker account. If they eliminated the password field entirely and just let people type whatever username they want, it'd be fine with me.
I'm not sure people don't do that. Certainly, gawker isn't very valuable, but e.g. Myspace data (analysed at e.g. http://www.schneier.com/essay-144.html, money quote: "The most common password, 'password1,' was used in 0.22 percent of all accounts". I'm sure you can find the original file if you look hard enough) suggests that weak passwords are still quite common at presumably-valuable sites.
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I think more than four thousand people are not dumb enough to set '123456' or 'password' as their password. I assume that a good percentage of that would for throwaway accounts and the users would be aware of the implications.
If i want to post a comment on a lifehacker blog post, there is a decent chance that i give some random string and 123456 as the username and password. This is the case when i know that i won't be using it again. True that an email is associated with the login credentials but still this might be true for many of those passwords.
Yup, I think one of those "password"s is mine. I truly couldn't care less about the security of my Gawker account. If they eliminated the password field entirely and just let people type whatever username they want, it'd be fine with me.
I'm not sure people don't do that. Certainly, gawker isn't very valuable, but e.g. Myspace data (analysed at e.g. http://www.schneier.com/essay-144.html, money quote: "The most common password, 'password1,' was used in 0.22 percent of all accounts". I'm sure you can find the original file if you look hard enough) suggests that weak passwords are still quite common at presumably-valuable sites.
Around 4750 use 12345678 and subsets as their password!