What did Adobe’s password hints give away?

When Adobe lost about 150 million records in a 2013 data breach, the passwords were encrypted, but in a way that made identical passwords look identical, and each one sat beside its hint in plain text.

The security researcher Jeremi Gosney worked out that about 1.9 million accounts had chosen 123456, and that many people “took the concept of a password hint too literally” and gave the password itself. Adobe’s own name made the top ten twice: adobe123 came fourth and photoshop ninth. In sixth place, with more than 130,000 accounts, was qwerty, the first six letters on a keyboard’s top row.