The darknet is the hidden side of the internet. There are websites that cannot be traced by authorities, making it an excellent place for criminals to conduct illegal activities anonymously.
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24 billion passwords have been leaked
A common criminal activity that takes place on the darknet is the selling and buying of passwords, usernames and email addresses. A report by Reliaquest from 2022 showed that over 24 billion account names and associated passwords have been leaked and distributed on the darknet since 2016.
Leaking passwords can be caused by many different things – and sometimes there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. But one thing is certain: having a complicated and hard-to-guess password is always better than not having one.
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The 20 most common passwords leaked on the Darknet
A report by the cyber security firm Lookout as of 2022 lists the 20 most common passwords found on the Darknet due to data breaches, something that New York Post also written about. Here are all of them:
So having numbers in logical sequence or simple phrases as your password is a bad strategy. Instead, try to include unusual characters and mix them with numbers and both upper and lower case letters.
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