A study from an international online security firm has discovered that the most popular computer password for business men and women continues to be “Password” or some variation thereof.

The Global Security Report for 2012 from Trustwave studied approximately 2.5 million passwords and discovered that 5 percent contained some form of the word “password." 

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.