Password reuse is rampant: nearly half of observed user logins are compromised
Accessing private content online, whether it's checking email or streaming your favorite show, almost always starts with a “login” step. Beneath this everyday task lies a widespread human mistake we still have not resolved: password reuse. Many users recycle passwords across multiple services, creating a ripple effect of risk when their credentials are leaked.
Based on Cloudflare's observed traffic between September - November 2024, 41% of successful logins across websites protected by Cloudflare involve compromised passwords. In this post, we’ll explore the widespread impact of password reuse, focusing on how it affects popular Content Management Systems (CMS), the behavior of bots versus humans in login attempts, and how attackers exploit stolen credentials to take over accounts at scale.
As part of our Application Security offering, we offer a free feature that checks if a password has been leaked in a known data breach of another service or application on the Internet. When we perform these checks, Cloudflare does not access or store plaintext end user passwords. We have built a privacy-preserving credential checking service that helps protect our users from compromised credentials. Passwords are hashed – i.e., converted into a random string of characters Continue reading