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Congratulations! You’ve finally convinced all of your coworkers, friends, and family to stop using “password” as their password. (No, not even passw0rd, Dad.) Now you need to teach them to stop keyboard walking.
Keyboard walking,the practice of choosing a password by typing a combination of letters that are next to each other on the keyboard, is more common than you might realize. According to new research released by password security software company Specops, millions of people are keyboard walking their way into a false sense of cybersecurity.
Specops looked at 800 million breached passwords to determine the top keyboard walks on three different standard keyboards. On the most popular QWERTY keyboard—named for those first six keys on the top row of letters—the prevailing keyboard walk was “QWERTY” (found over a million times), followed by “QWERT.” Perhaps the easiest two passwords for a slacker to choose, this side of “12345.”
But password walks happen on other keyboards too. On the French-designed Azerty keyboard, the top keyboard walk was XCVBN, which are the second through sixth keys on the bottom row of the keyboard. It was found more than 143,000 times. On the QWERTZ keyboard, used in central Europe, the most common keyboard walk was “QWERT,” found 1.4+ million times.
Until we all get passkeys and two-factor authentication, block these passwords on your network, if you’re in charge of one. And fire up that family group chat or the security tips Slack channel and let your people know about keyboard walking.