Major password breach sees over 19 million leaked heres how to check if yours is compromised

Your password is probably hacker bait.Cybersecurity researchers have discovered that 19 billion passwords are circulating online — and only 6% of these leaked passwords were unique, meaning they weren’t reused or duplicated.Researchers at Cybernews studied more than 200 data breaches that occurred between April 2024 and April 2025.Of the 19,030,305,929 real passwords exposed online, 94% had been reused across accounts and services, either by the same person or by different users entirely.And the most common passwords were all too easy for hackers to decode: 42% were only 8-10 characters in length, and 27% contained only lowercase letters and numbers with no special characters or mixed-case variation.“Despite years of security education, users still prefer shorter passwords because they are easier to type and memorize.It’s recommended to use at least 12 characters for a password,” Neringa Macijauskaitė, information security researcher at Cybernews, said in a statement.One of the major issues is that many people stick with “default” passwords and lazy, simple keyboard combinations.

The analysis found that “1234” is used in almost 4% of all passwords, meaning over 727 million passwords use this sequence.When expanding that sequence to “123456,” 338 million passwords use it.The research also revealed that 56 million passwords use the word “Password” and 53 million use “admin.” Since at least 2011, “Password” and “123456” have been the most popular passwords.“The ‘default password’ problem remains one of the most persistent and dangerous patterns in leaked credential datasets,” Macijauskaitė said.

“Attackers, too, prioritize them, making these passwords among the least secure.”The cybersecurity experts also recommend to never reuse passwords across different accounts and sites in order to keep your information safe.“We’re facing a widespread epidemic of weak password reuse,” Macijauskaitė explained.“If you re...