Hotmail Scam Reveals Most Common Password: 123456
It's never fun to be on the wrong end of a hack. But often, we can use them as learning experiences So, what did we learn when around 10,000 Hotmail, MSN, and Live.com account passwords were revealed on PasteBin last weekend? Either people are lazy or our memories have withered away to nothing in this digital age. According to Wired, the most common password on the list was "123456." That's right, a series of consecutive numbers was the password to 64 e-mail accounts on the list. Bogdan Calin from the security site Acunetix analyzed the password list and found other disturbing trends, too. For example, just 6-percent used passwords that mixed numbers and letters. Nearly 42-percent of the passwords used only lowercase letters. What's truly scary is that the list only included addresses beginning with the letter 'A' or 'B,' which means we're only seeing a small small sampling.
Just today, news broke that an anonymous user of PasteBin.com, a legitimate site marketed to software developers, posted more than 10,000 Hotmail addresses and passwords to the site last Thursday. 
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Hotmail's contacts manager and calendar received updates, but the changes are primarily cosmetic. The calendar lacks user-definable categories, a one-click quick add feature and the ability to subscribe to calendars other than those shared by other Hotmail users (this means no easy-to-use holiday calendars).
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