Users chose “Password1″ because it fulfilled the requirements that the identifier must have a capitalized letter, a number, and enough characters to satisfy a system’s minimum security requirements, the report said.  

Among the other key findings in the report are that customer records remained the primary target of cybercriminals, comprising nearly 90% of the breached data investigated by the security firm; the food and beverage industry had the highest percentage of investigations (44%) for the second time; franchise businesses were the target of more than 33% of all investigations in 2011; and the security deficiencies leading to more than three-fourths of the incident response investigations were caused by third-party system support or maintenance professionals.

Trustwave also reported that law enforcement personnel detected one-third of security breaches in 2011 — an increase from 7% the previous year — and that anti-virus software was able to detect malware samples collected less than 12% for the time. Furthermore, for the fourth consecutive year, the most prevalent type of Web-based attacks was SQL injection attacks.