Barely 3000 people used '123456' as their Gawker password

&#62; A plurality of Gawker Media passwords are six characters long<p>A plurality of <i>brute forced</i> Gawker Media passwords are six characters long. Maybe this statistic is valid for all 1.5 million passwords, but that's quite a lot of extrapolation. Taking the easiest 10% of passwords to brute force and basing the data off that?<p>They mention this fact on the paragraph prior, and then seem to forget about it: "In both cases, the datasets only include passwords that could be decoded and aren’t necessarily representive [sic] of all users."

I'm not sure this even matters. Gawker accounts are for commenting on inane media stories. If people used the same password for their email, that's one thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if most had a harder password for their email, and resorted to 123456 etc. for less important accounts.

I got two emails today claiming to be from gawker, telling me to change my password.<p>Both were phishing emails that pointed to a domain in China and another in India. These guys move fast

I've got the same combination on my luggage

My favorite is always the people who go the extra length and use '12345678'.<p>Also, why are Jennifer and Michelle the first female names on the list? Are they just the most common names for women?<p>And is there a story to "monkey"?

Why is the title here on HN “Barely”? Because it’s less than 1%?

My favorite throwaway password is 'nopassword'

I'm curious how many were 'jesus' 'bible' and/or some other obvious one.