The Password "123456" Was All a Hacker Needed to Expose Personal Information of Over 8 Million People

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Please, please do not use "123456" as any type of password. I know it may sound obvious, but apparently if the recent hack of the Danish Central Register of Persons (CPR) is anything to go by, it bears repeating.

As a reminder, the CPR administration said earlier this month that it was aware of the breach that occurred in September (PDF notice). It revealed the personal information of 8.8 million people, both living and deceased - names, addresses, social security numbers. At the time, it was confirmed that the legal access of a private Danish company was exploited by the attacker.

The person who claimed responsibility for the attack was announced this week. Not only that, but they say they accessed CPR through an account with the password '123456'. According to the Danish newspaper Poltiken, this was one of three accounts of this private company with the same password. One of these was the administrator account. Talk about a cyber security boo.

The self-identified attacker claims they have no intention of disclosing or selling the data they took, so that's something. However, we're left with the unpleasant reminder that those who should know better don't always have the best. Password Management

The Danish company at the heart of the attack has been identified as Pays ApS. The company reached out to CPR to provide various services, such as validating business customer records.

The self-identified attacker gained access to the Pays ApS account on September 10 and then performed 14 million automated CPR searches between then and September 20. The attack was only discovered on October 2, when an employee of the Ministry of Research, Education and Digitization noticed an unusually high factor, which indicated that many more searches than usual were made by Pays ApS.

Hackers are very aware of the most common passwords, with '123456' often confusingly popular among them. In the end, now might be a good time to update your passwords to something unique to you, or check out password tools (though even something like a password manager isn't quite as intuitive).

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Not every hacker can rock a password-cracking rig with 12 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090s — for example, I'm particularly impressed by Game Boy Advance password cracking, which is "about thirty million times slower than a modern crack rig." But if your password is '123456', a hacker will not need more hardware than his brain to open your account like a coconut.

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Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, with a significant portion of that time spent working on PLAY print publications and PlayStation Official Magazine. When he's not checking out all things hardware here, he's either making an impassioned defense of a 7/10 game, daydreaming about his first novel, or envying the last time he got chased around a field with a giant foam sword.

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