Last month an unknown hacker stole a list of 32 million passwords from RockYou, a company that makes software for users of social networking sites. The Imperva Application Defense Center analyzed the passwords and found that about 20 percent of the users had simple, easily guessed passwords like "123456". The NY Times reported that a similar study in the 1990s also found that the majority of people used very simple passwords like "abc123".  Stronger password protocols like using a mix of upper and lowercase letters and special symbols help make passwords more difficult to guess. However, TechCrunch reported that the hacked passwords had been stored as unencrypted data, which means that once stolen it didn't matter how strong the password was. In that case, two factor authentication gives the users security over their accounts even if the first password was known.