Top 10 passwords used by manufacturing industry employees

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Construction and manufacturing industries’ employees use shockingly weak passwords, as revealed by NordPass’s new research. This alarms security experts, as weak passwords make it very easy for hackers to access accounts.

Here are the top 10 passwords in construction and manufacturing industries:

1. Company name*
2. password
3. aaron431
4. 123456
5. Company name eu*
6. 123ccp
7. pass1
8. company name*
9. Company name*
10. Company name*

* This password is a company name or a variation of it (e.g. Company name2002). We are not naming the exact company.

The researchers analyzed data from public third-party breaches that affected Fortune 500 companies. In total, the analyzed data included 15,603,438 breaches and was categorized into 17 different industries. The researchers looked into the top 10 passwords used in each industry, the percentile of unique passwords, and the number of data breaches affecting each industry.

Weak passwords are one of the top causes of data breaches in business

Simple passwords are very dangerous to all users, but businesses and their employees need to take extra care when it comes to cybersecurity. For example, back in February, a water treatment facility in Florida had a serious computer breach. The company used an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and shared the same TeamViewer password among its employees. And in December 2020, SolarWinds suffered from a big data breach, reportedly due to protecting one of their servers with the password “solarwinds123”.

“Businesses and their employees have a duty to protect their customers’ data. A weak password of one employee could potentially jeopardize the whole company if an attacker used the breached password to gain access to sensitive data,” says Chad Hammond, security expert at NordPass.

Data breach cost

According to an IBM report, an average global cost of a data breach is $3.86 million. However, a data breach in the healthcare industry costs much more — $7.13 million. And out of all countries, data breaches in US-based companies are the most expensive — $8.64 million. According to Statista, the cost consists of things like: lost business resulting from diminished trust or confidence of customers; costs related to detection, escalation, and notification of the breach; ex-post response activities, such as credit report monitoring.