Direct Source: theverge.com

Fifty-two percent of people reuse the same password for multiple accounts, according to the results of a poll published in February 2019 by Google and polling firm Harris. Thirteen percent of people reuse that password for all of their accounts, that poll found. And Microsoft said in 2019 that 44 million Microsoft accounts used logins that had been leaked online.

Google has been trying to help users build better password habits for some time, slowly but surely. For years, the company has offered a built-in password manager in Google Accounts on Chrome and Android that can save your passwords and auto-fill them on websites and apps.

“Passwords are one of the worst things on the internet,” Mark Risher, Google’s senior director for account security, identity, and abuse told The Verge. 

“We know from other research we’ve done in the past that people who’ve had their data exposed by a data breach are 10 times more likely to be hijacked than a person that’s not exposed by one of these breaches,” said Kurt Thomas, a member of Google’s anti-abuse and security research team.

Google gets compromised logins from “multiple different sources and trusted partners,” Thomas said, including underground forums where password dumps are openly shared. “We have an ethical policy that we will never pay criminals for stolen data,” he continued. “But just by virtue of how these markets work, very often, [stolen data] will bubble up and become available.” Using personas Google has in those marketplaces, the company can acquire the data, he said.

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