A recent report into the scandal involving thousands of hacked Hotmail accounts has revealed that the passwords were likely quite easy to crack in the first place.

Bogdan Calin, a security expert who maintains his own space on the Acunetic Web Application Security Blog, explained that the list, which contained 10,028 entries when it was posted to PasteBin before the website went down for maintenance, showed interesting patterns.

The two most common passwords were 123456 (64 instances) and 123456789 (18 instances), with many of the top 20 coming from a predominantly Hispanic dialect.

Mr Calin said: "Based on these passwords I think the phishing kit was targeted towards the Latino community."

As a result, alajandra was the third most popular password with 11 instances, while alberto, tequiero, alejandro and estrella all made the top 20.

Since the incident, a number of sources have emphasised the need for people to vary their passwords, as most people tend to use the same password for everything they are associated with online, including those working in small businesses in IT.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.