Your Password Policy Isn't Protecting You. Your Employees' Habits Are.
Thought Leadership Credential Risk May 2026 · 8 min read 94% of leaked passwords are reused or duplicated. Employees reuse the same password an average of 13 times. And by 2026, nearly half of all successful cyberattacks on SMBs will originate from credential reuse. Most businesses have a password policy. Almost none have visibility into whether anyone follows it. Think about the password you use for your personal email. Now think about whether any of your employees use that same password — or a variation of it — to log into your business systems. You don't know. And that uncertainty is the problem. In 2024, a security researcher analyzed 19.03 billion leaked passwords from breach databases and found that only 6% were unique. The other 94% had been used before — on another account, at another company, in another breach. Every one of those reused credentials is a master key that attackers test systematically...