July 23, 2012
10 Passwords Everyone Uses (And You Shouldn’t)
Good method of creating passwords (credit: XKCD Comics) Click if difficult to read (it’s pretty funny, worth the effort)
There’s one good outcome from the Yahoo breach (a hacker defeated Yahoo’s firewalls, stole 450,000 accounts, and proceeded to post the user names and passwords onlines). You know all that dire advice about using numbers and letters and symbols in passwords? Turns out the Yahoo users didn’t. A peek at their twenty favorite passwords makes it clear once more that the biggest impediment to computer security remains human users:
- 123456′ used by 1666 (0.38%)
- ‘password’ used by 780 (0.18%)
- welcome’ used by 436 (0.1%)
- ‘ninja’ used by 333 (0.08%)
- ‘abc123’ used by 250 (0.06%)
- ‘123456789’ used by 222 (0.05%)
- ‘12345678’ used by 208 (0.05%)
- ‘sunshine’ used by 205 (0.05%)
- ‘princess’ used by 202 (0.05%)
- ‘qwerty’ used by 172 (0.04%)
If you’re thinking this looks familiar, you’re right. Here are the top 25 from 2011:
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- qwerty
- abc123
- monkey
- 1234567
- letmein
- trustno1
- dragon
- baseball
- 111111
- iloveyou
- master
- sunshine
- ashley
- bailey
- passw0rd
- shadow
- 123123
- 654321
- superman
- qazwsx
- michael
- Football
Let’s review Password 101:
- include different types of letters, numbers and special characters
- longer is better
- use different passwords for different accounts
- you can use a password strength tester to create a secure password that can’t be cracked
I’m happy to share that my passwords aren’t on either of these lists. How about yours?
Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-sixth grade, creator of two technology training books for middle school and three ebooks on technology in education. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog, IMS tech expert, and a bi-weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.
