There’s a good chance that the password on your streaming service sucks

Three things that should be taught in school: Sex-ed, basic personal finance, and good password hygiene. Sadly, at least for those of us here in the United States, all three are sorely lacking.

The latter point was laid bare in a study from members of Google’s Spam and Abuse Research Team. Too many passwords are being reused — and that opens the users to credential stuffing, which is where a bad actor tries a username and password combination leaked from one service on all kinds of other services, just to see if they’ll work.

Or, to put it simply, if your Netflix email and password is the same as the what you used for MySpace and was part of that 360 million-account breach, there’s a good chance someone can get into your Netflix account if they want.

Just because it’s not as “important” as your bank doesn’t mean it doesn’t need a good password.

The researchers (which also included one from Stanford University) came to their conclusions from Google Chrome’s Password Checkup extension, which securely checks passwords saved in Chrome with more than 4 billion unsafe username and password combinations that were at some point caught up in a breach.

The pattern of behavior shouldn’t be terrible surprising. Big targets like banks and other financial institutions would more typically have strong, unique passwords. Softer targets like streaming services and other entertainment sites (and, I’d wager, things that you might also log in to from some sort of TV remote control) pinged the list of unsafe logins far more often.

How much more often? The nine entertainment sites listed in the study (they didn’t say which ones) made up just 0.8 percent of the total number of visits, but accounted for 6.3 percent of the warnings. The next highest warning rate was “adult” websites at 3.6 percent. (Which made up just 0.2 percent of the total number of visits. Seems low, but whatever.)

The scarier number is the “ignore rate,” which means users were warned that their passwords potentially had been breached at some point — but they chose not to change them. Adult sites made up 38.5 percent of ignored warnings, and entertainment sites were second at 27.1 percent.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/theres-good-chance-password-your-streaming-service-sucks