Understanding the Problem

Weak credentials are one of the most consistently overlooked security risks inside modern companies. When you look at the data, the pattern is remarkably stable: in many organizations, 20–40% of all secrets qualify as weak — often without anyone realizing it. And while the concept of a "weak password" seems simple, the underlying causes are structural. Weak credentials appear because of human behavior, legacy habits, absent guardrails, and the operational scale at which businesses manage secrets today. The points below break down why the problem is so widespread.

1. Weak credentials are easy to guess or easy to crack — and therefore not real secretsAt their core, weak credentials lack entropy. They follow predictable patterns, reuse familiar words or numbers, or are short enough that both online and offline attacks can break them quickly. In online scenarios, even modest guessing speeds can compromise a weak password within hours or days. In offline scenarios — where attackers can try billions of guesses per second — weak credentials fall almost instantly. A secret that can be cracked under realistic attacker conditions cannot be considered a meaningful barrier.
2. Many credentials don't need to be memorable — but people behave as if they doA large share of workplace secrets never need to be typed: API tokens, automation credentials, database passwords, deployment keys, service accounts. They are copied, pasted, or used programmatically. Nonetheless, many of these credentials are created with the same human-friendly patterns as user passwords. This creates a category of weak credentials that could have been strong with no additional friction at all — simply because memorability was assumed where it wasn't required.
3. Password reuse turns otherwise acceptable secrets into weak onesA credential may be sufficiently long or complex on its own, but once it appears in more than one place, its effective strength collapses. If one system is compromised, the same password can be used to attack others — online or offline. Reuse also makes guessing behavior more efficient for attackers, since common patterns propagate across accounts. In practice, reuse is one of the most common drivers of weak credentials inside companies.
4. Relying solely on MFA creates a false sense of safetyThere is a reasonable argument that strong, phishing-resistant MFA can compensate for weaker passwords. In practice, this breaks down quickly. Many systems don't support MFA, non-human access almost never uses it, shared accounts rarely enforce it, and MFA adoption is uneven even when available. As a result, weak passwords remain exposed in places where MFA does not reliably protect them — often without teams realizing it.
5. Passkeys and modern authentication are promising, but far from widely adoptedPasskeys could eliminate entire classes of weak credentials, but adoption in enterprises is still early. Compatibility challenges, rollout complexity and user readiness all slow things down. Until passkeys or similar methods are broadly deployed across human and non-human access, passwords remain a central security mechanism — and weak passwords remain a central problem.

How Gorilla solves it

Gorilla analyzes every item and every secret field across your 1Password tenant and evaluates the quality of each credential. Behind the scenes, we use well-established and continuously refined methods: sophisticated password-analysis libraries, known-breach datasets, pattern detection and dictionary checks. This allows Gorilla to estimate how easily a secret could be guessed or cracked under realistic attack conditions.

Whenever a credential is considered weak, Gorilla surfaces a clear Finding that points directly to the affected item and recommends rotation. There is no searching, no interpreting entropy scores, no manual auditing. Weak secrets appear as concrete, actionable tasks that teams can resolve quickly, so the problem doesn't stay hidden across vaults and systems.