“Your financial accounts are very, very important - a close number two - but in so many cases, you can unlock those financial accounts simply by doing a password reset to your email,” Wisniewski said. According to Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at Sophos (a digital security company), your email accounts are the most critical ones to protect. It’s critical to have a unique password - one that’s really strong - on your most sensitive accounts: financial, social media and email. “All they need to do is get the password for one website and they have access to every single one you use … your bank account, credit card, maybe tax return, everything across the board.” “Criminals know that and take advantage of it,” Johnson told NBC News BETTER. Brett Johnson, a former identity thief who is now a digital security consultant, says about 80 percent of people with online passwords use the same one for multiple websites. If just one account is compromised, all of them are at risk.
The potential for serious trouble goes up dramatically if you use the same weak password on more than one account. “Hackers will try the most common passwords first whenever they’re trying to breach an account, so people are putting themselves at much higher risk of having their identity stolen.” THE POTENTIAL FOR A CASCADING FAILURE “It’s a little bit sad and frightening, given that we're seeing so many hacks,” Slain told NBC News BETTER. SplashData estimates that almost 10 percent of all computer users have at least one of the 25 worst passwords on this year’s list and nearly 3 percent use the worst one, 123456.
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