Researchers warn that popular passwords pose a big risk to online security

Researchers at Microsoft and Harvard University warn that popular passwords pose a bigger risk to online security than weak ones and suggest that many tools to enforce strong passwords actually steer users to choices that are easy to guess.Forcing users to choose passwords that are rare and “unpopular,” rather than “strong,” as it has traditionally been defined, provides a better defense against one type of attack, known as “statistical guessing,” according to a paper by researchers Cormac Herley and Stuart Schechter of Microsoft Research and Michael Mitzenmacher, a professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Read the full article…