THE ten most commonly used passwords on the web have been revealed as part of an analysis of tens of millions of internet accounts. Imperva, a data security firm, said it had analysed around 32 million passwords that had been exposed in a recent hack of the RockYou website. In December last year a hacker breached the sites company database and gained access to the unencrypted usernames and passwords of all its 32 million users. After studying the security breach Imperva has come up with a list of the most commonly used passwords which website users should avoid. Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in todays world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second-or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes, said Amichai Shulman, Impervas chief technical officer. Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like '123456, he added. The problem has changed very little over the past 20 years. Its time for everyone to take password security seriously; its an important first step in data security. Telegraph The ten most commonly used passwords analysed in the study were: 1. 123456 2. 12345 3. 123456789 4. Password 5. iloveyou 6. princess 7. rockyou 8. 1234567 9. 12345678 10. abc123