Thirty percent of CEOs from the world’s largest organizations have had their company email address and password stolen from a breached service. Given the continuing tendency for users to employ simple passwords and reuse the same passwords across multiple accounts, the implication is that at least some of these CEOs are at risk of losing their email accounts to cyber criminals or foreign nation state hacking groups.
The statistic comes from a report (PDF) published today by F-Secure, whose researchers checked the email addresses of 200 CEOs from the world’s largest organizations against a database of leaked credentials. It notes that the 30% figure increases to 63% for tech companies.
