How secure are the passwords you use to access your banking or investment data? A recent article in Forbes magazine surveyed security company SplashData’s password dumps, looking for the world’s most common—and, therefore, easiest to guess—passwords. This is a big problem; SplashData estimates that just over 10% of people use at least one of the 25 most common passwords. Guess which words hackers and cyber thieves are going to guess first when they try to hack into the account that contains your banking information?
The most common password, as you might have guessed, is 123456, which also happened to be the most common in 2014 and 2015. Other popular passwords were 1234, 12345, 1234567, 12345678, 1234567890. Also, for some reason, 121212 became popular in 2016.
The list also includes the old standby “password,” and “password1” (selected by people who discover that somebody else is using “password” so they can’t use it). Others on the most common list include “querty,” “login,” “welcome,” and “admin.” Among the old favorites, SplashData lists “football,” “princess,” “solo,” “abc123,” “dragon” and “master.”
New words making the top 25 this year include “hottie,” “loveme,” “sunshine,” and “flower.”
If you use any of these words, you might want to make a change now, before a hacker decides to route some of your money to an undisclosed offshore location.
Blog No. 106 – The 25 Worst Passwords
Source:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ and SplashData
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
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