Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service, issued a warning to its subscribers on Tuesday, stating that a global crackdown on password sharing is coming their way. This might put a stop to the popular practise of accessing the platform using the login credentials of a family member or acquaintance.

The platform admitted its problems in growing its subscriber base in a letter to shareholders posted accompanying its quarterly results, and recorded a rare decline in overall user subscriptions, from 221.8 million in Q4 2021 to 221.6 million in the first quarter of this year.

In the letter, Netflix stated:

When combined with competition, our relatively high home penetration—especially when considering the vast number of households sharing accounts—creates revenue growth hurdles.

Netflix estimates that over 100 million households across the world utilise shared passwords to access its content, including over 30 million of these households in the United States and Canada. The estimate was released at the same time as the firm announced efforts to improve the monetization of multi-household sharing. The platform’s user count in the United States and Canada fell from 75.2 million in Q4 2021 to 74.5 million in Q1 2022.

The company’s decision to turn a blind eye to password sharing for all these years, according to the quarterly shareholder’s letter, certainly fostered the video-streaming service’s growth. The corporation now demands that the account holders who supply the freeloaders pay for the service they are consuming.

It intends to find a compromise between permitting sharing and helping generate income from everyone who has been seeing and getting value from its service by charging members who are sharing their accounts to pay more. This isn’t the only method Netflix intends to profit from its growing customer base. The company also said that it intends to launch an ad-supported plan.

The post Netflix Preps Bigger Password-Sharing Crackdown appeared first on Techlist.

Passwords are believed to be the most secure codes that protect privacy. Unfortunately, these secure codes are too easy to crack because they are mostly very easy and common.

Keeper is one of the leading secure password manager. This security company has unveiled some of the common passwords used in 2016. The list started with ‘123456’ at the top followed by many easy combinations.

A list under the title of  “The Most Common Passwords of 2016″ was released by Keeper.

The results are based on the research work of the team who analyzed more than 10 million passwords. To the surprise one of the easiest combination is ‘123456‘, which people use to protect their accounts and it comes in the list of vulnerable passwords.

It was followed by ‘123456789‘ on the second  and than were ‘qwerty’, ‘12345678’, ‘111111’, ‘1234567890’ and ‘1234567’ on 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 positions respectively.

The word password itself is used as password. It was ranked 8 in the list.

‘18atcskd2w’ was on 15th position in the list.

The Security Researcher, Graham Cluley said,

“These accounts were created by bots, perhaps with the intention of posting spam onto the forums. “

‘google’ was not spared either. It was in the list on 21 st number.

To remember their passwords with ease people use easy passwords  and thus they select sequential characters and digits to create their password but they forget that this is a big risk. All your privacy can be at stake.

How to protect your passwords?

The best way to make your password strong use wide range of letters and numbers. Use upper and lower case letters and even symbols that are allowed so that  your account remains safe. Avoid from these Vulnerable Passwords.

Do not use common dictionary  words as people nowadays use dictionary cracks that give password quicker and near to accurate.

The easy passwords are becoming common because they are difficult to remember. Password generators should be used to enjoy safe surfing.

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