According to this article, these were the worst passwords of 2013:
- 123456
- password
- 12345678
- qwerty
- abc123
- 123456789
- 111111
- 1234567
- iloveyou
- adobe123
- 123123
- Admin
- 1234567890
- letmein
- photoshop
- 1234
- monkey
- shadow
- sunshine
- 12345
- password1
- princess
- azerty
- trustno1
- 000000
Would you believe that people on some super-sensitive government sites use passwords like those? Government Passwords Are incredibly Easy to Hack mentions some of them, as well as other serious security problems. One example was
Hackers swiped Information on the nation’s dams—including their weaknesses and catastrophic potential if breached—from an Army Corps of Engineers database.
The article talks about many others.
Recently we talked about the downside of creativity — hackers are a great example. But when they’re careless, non-creative people can do a lot of damage too.
February 7, 2014
I have two very ingenious passwords which are easy for me to remember but I imagine very hard for anyone else to guess. They’re not in any way obvious or predictable. Anyone who still uses 123456 must be worse than gormless.
The people using easy-to-hack passwords on sensitive sites are bad enough, but what about the guys who are supposed to be in charge? When I was working we were issued a new password composed of random letters once a year. We weren’t allowed to write it down, so I would simply keep typing mine in until my fingers knew it by heart. That only worked because it was just one password and I used it almost every day. If you forgot it you could try three times, then you would be locked out until you went to get a new one. That was a huge hassle, as well it should have been. They took security seriously.
Funny you should mention this, Jean. I have passwords to die for. Yet, for once, not a subject to be shared on the world wide web. Pity. You’d admire me. Not, of course, that I ever remember any of them.
Lost in the woods,
U
I have some great passwords too, and I have them written down in a fairly safe place. Apparently the next step would be to have them saved on a device which encrypts them and can only be accessed with yet another password. I haven’t gone that far yet.
OMG.
the idea of the weaknesses of major dams exposed.
the mind boggles.
let’s hope batman and superman and the iron man are on the job.
and i give up.
just can’t get that hark off of there. don’t know how to get the cozy m in its place on the url. have tried several ways. and the captain is tied up in a video project. oh well! LOL. life goes on.
I agree with you that we could use some superheroes.
I’m sorry you’re having trouble with changing your URL from the peanut to cozy m. I tried changing it here, but that doesn’t change what’s in CommentLuv. It’s not that important.
Dates that are personal to you ought to be good. Hard working hackers might find out those too.
They say it’s best to have a combination of lower case and capital letters plus some numbers and other characters. And the longer the better.
Last week, the University wanted me to change my password as it was to “expire” – apparently they expire yearly but it seems I have lost in the system for the entire years I have been there.
It had to be 8 characters, a mix of things if possible…
Everything I tried it didn’t like, and finally in desperation I looked around my living room and find something that doesn’t even live in said room (so don’t try to guess it), it was a bold word in a newspaper advert and I TRIED THAT – it loved it!
After I followed the rest of the instructions I had to restart my computer – which I did BUT THEN it wouldn’t accept that password at all, let alone the previous one…
I found in the original email a help address and sent a message to it…a reply soon arrived but it made absolutely no sense and the more I tried to get anything to work, the worse it GOT.
I gave up, thought I will deal with it next week!
At some point a few days later I came up with a bright idea… I logged on to My Library account at Uni and where the password should I have been, was a click through menu “forgotten password” – it all went swimmingly AND I ended up with the very same password string I wanted in the first place…
Now to REMEMBER IT because it is nothing like any of my other passwords 🙂 🙂
I’m freezing. The pictures of the lake thermal, hot water pools look very inviting.
What I hate is when you take the time to construct a strong password, write it down so you’ll remember it correctly, then later the site tells you sorry, not a valid password. Then when you try to change the new password to the one that should have been correct, the site says, sorry, you’ve already used that password recently, you have to create another one. Arghh!
I left a letter out of bikehikebabe on Facebook. When I tried to use it correctly, I was told that bikehikebabe was already taken. YES –BY ME. I had to make it bikehikebabe66. That 66 as caused so much trouble, because now I have two identities wherever I go.
BHB: the pools are a god send in that part of NZ – close to the snowfields…
computers – we luv ‘me, we ‘ate them – we can’t live without them…
Computers do keep our problem-solving skills tuned up!
Creative passwords? My son and heir who is also the resident geek has come up with passwords for me that I doubt even God will be able to hack. My problem is in remembering which is for what!
That, of course, is the problem!