Varna’s Mind

Wow!

A researcher who examined 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords that were recently exposed online has published an analysis of the list and found that “123456″ was the most commonly used password, appearing 64 times.

Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from “a to z”; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters.

Many of the top 20 passwords used were Spanish names, such as Alejandra and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were in Spanish-speaking communities. Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters long. The longest password was 30 characters — lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo.

The 10,000 passwords and user names, believed to be booty from a phishing attack, were posted over the weekend to the clipboard site PasteBin. The site owner has since removed the list, but Bogdan Calin of Acunetix grabbed the passwords before it disappeared.

The list included only online account addresses that began with “A” or “B,” suggesting that the list was only part of a larger cache of credentials. On Tuesday, the BBC reported that it had viewed a second list of more than 20,000 account credentials that included Gmail, Yahoo and AOL accounts, and that Google had uncovered a third list containing an unknown number of accounts.

Some of the accounts on the list of 20,000 names the BBC saw appeared to be old, unused or fake, though many were genuine. The list also included Comcast and Earthlink accounts.

Both Google and Microsoft, which own Gmail and Hotmail, MSN and Live.com respectively, have taken measures to block use of the exposed accounts until the legitimate users can reset their passwords.

Image: Sharon Rosen/flickr

Just over a week ago, Twitter announced its fifth round of funding. While not officially disclosed, the recent cash infusion is estimated to be around $100 million. Twitter’s new estimated worth? – $1 billion.

With all of this valuation talk floating around, we became interested in just how fast Twitter’s (

) worth has skyrocketed. It seems that VC Expert’s Private Equity Data Center (PEDC) was curious as well, so they decided to analyze all of Twitter’s financing rounds, from the first one in July of 2007 to last month’s $100 million cash infusion.

We took a look at the PEDC numbers and some research of our own. We’ve picked five statistics that speak to the unprecedented growth of Twitter as a service and as a company. Prepare yourselves for some shocking numbers:

Twitter’s Value: 5 Eye-Popping Stats

1. According to PEDC’s numbers, the price of a single share of Twitter has increased by 239,619%, from a measly $0.00667 per share to a much stronger $15.9824.

2. Twitter’s $100 million round is over 1025 times the amount of money they raised in its very first round of funding. In July of 2007, Twitter raised $97,500.

3. In five rounds of funding, Twitter has raised an estimated $153 million (some peg it a few million dollars higher). Since the day of its initial round of funding, Twitter has been given an average of $187,356 per day by its investors.

4. Using that same time frame and its current $1 billion valuation, Twitter’s worth has grown by $1,223,990 per day. If you start with the day of Twitter’s inception (the first tweet from Twitter’s Inventor and Chairman, Jack Dorsey), then Twitter’s worth has grown by around $772,797 per day.

5. Twitter has yet to make a single cent in profit. We’ll let you be the judge of what that means. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Data table courtesy of the PEDC, Image courtesy of iStockphoto (

), tforgo