"The first you know about it is when you find out someone has accessed one of your accounts. You've been careful with your details so you can't work out what has gone wrong, but you have made one mistake recycling part of your password. Reusing the same word in a password even if it is altered to include numbers or symbols gives criminals a way in to your accounts."
"Hackers obtain passwords and test them out on other websites a practice known as credential stuffing to see whether they can break into accounts. But in some cases they do not just try the exact passwords from the hacked data: as well as credential stuffing, the fraudsters also attempt to access accounts with derivations of the hacked password. Research from Virgin Media O2 suggests four out of every five people use the same or nearly identical passwords on online accounts."
Reusing the same word in multiple passwords, even when altered with numbers or symbols, allows criminals to break into accounts through credential stuffing and derivations. Information obtained from data breaches on sites such as DropBox and Tumblr circulates online and is reused by attackers. Research from Virgin Media O2 suggests four out of five people use the same or nearly identical passwords across accounts. Slight alterations such as Guardian1 instead of Guardian offer little protection. Ethical hackers have shown that supplying an email address can reveal linked passwords within minutes. Criminals deploy automated scripts at industrial scale to test password variations across thousands of accounts.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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