Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Passwords 101

Time has published a list of this year's "25 worst passwords to use".  Without further ado, they are:
1. password
2, 123456
3. 12345678
4. abc123
5. qwerty
6. monkey
7. letmein
8. dragon
9. 111111
10. baseball
11. iloveyou
12. trustno1
13. 1234567
14. sunshine
15. master
16. 123123
17. welcome
18. shadow
19. ashley
20. football
21. jesus
22. michael
23. ninja
24. mustang
25. password1

This list is based on the frequencey of ACTUAL passwords that have been hacked.  I'm sorry, but honestly, in this day and age, is it really that much of a revelation that it's not a good idea to use any password in this list, or any password that would be fully contained in a dictionary?  It's not like this is a revelation that an easy password to remember is an easy password to guess/hack.

Regardless if your password is on the list or not, there's a number of very good websites which will assess the relative strength and security of your password.  One of the better ones that I found is as follows:

Please, let's have some common sense.  If we all have strong passwords, it will make it much less likely that at least the casual hacker would be interested in trying to determine your password.

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