New study reveals important precautions against cybercrime

Though modern security systems on all of our mobile tech make things a lot easier, cybercrime is still a major threat. Of the various nefarious methods hackers use, ransomware is a popular one that wreaked havoc last year and shows no signs of stopping.

Computer security analysts PreciseSecurity ran a study to reveal the major causes of falling victim to ransomware attacks, as well as how any user can make sure they are well protected. One of the leading vulnerabilities was weak password management—a factor that made 30% of all ransomware attacks possible.

Weak passwords represent major security flaws that can be easily fixed but rarely are. In fact, the study found more than half of users used the same weak password across many accounts. A whopping 23.2 million victims of ransomware had the password ‘123456’, while another 3.5 million used ‘password’ as their password.

Changing passwords to something more complex should be the norm, and many sites no longer allow you to even use simpler passwords anymore, but codes like ‘Password123’ can still be used in most cases. And because almost half of participants simply memorize their passwords, complex key phrases can backfire by being forgotten.

A simple way to prevent this problem is the use of very complex passwords and a password manager, but this solution is adopted only slowly. In fact, barely ten percent of respondents used a password manager, though almost twice that many stored passwords in their browser.

The key takeaways? Use complex, unique passwords for each account, using a password manager if you have trouble remembering.