Tuesday, January 27, 2015

You’re probably using one of these 25 terrible passwords - Quartz




You're probably using one of these 25 terrible passwords


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As hackers know all too well, most people are lazy password-creators. And despite several high-profile data breaches, not much changed in 2014.
The year's most common—and least secure—passwords looked pretty familiar, according to the security services company SplashData's annual list, based on 3.3 million leaked passwords in North America and Europe.
As in 2013, "123456" and "password" held the top two slots, and number-only passwords in general comprised half of the top ten passwords. Patterns like "qwerty," which is the consecutive six keys at the top of the keyboard, remained in the top five.
There were a few new additions in the top 25 most-used passwords: Superheroes such as "batman" and "superman" were popular; "dragon" and "mustang," showed a love of wild beasts, and "baseball" and "football" of sports. Meanwhile, the simpler, more upbeat days of 2013's "princess," "sunshine," and "iloveyou" were over. (The continued popularity of "shadow" and "trustno1″ indicated some aspirations to subterfuge—thwarted, perhaps, by those passwords' ubiquity.)
rank 2013 2014
1 123456 123456
2 password password
3 12345678 12345
4 qwerty 12345678
5 abc123 qwerty
6 123456789 1234567890
7 111111 1234
8 1234567 baseball
9 iloveyou dragon
10 adobe123 football
11 123123 1234567
12 admin monkey
13 1234567890 letmein
14 letmein abc123
15 photoshop 111111
16 1234 mustang
17 monkey access
18 shadow shadow
19 sunshine master
20 12345 michael
21 password1 superman
22 princess 696969
23 azerty 123123
24 trustno1 batman
25 000000 trustno1
Appearances aside, people actually seem to have taken greater precautions with online protection, said Mark Burnett, an online security expert who worked with SplashData. 2014 saw the "lowest percentage of people using the most common passwords" he explained.
Besides avoiding the common passwords, here are some tips to creating a safer password: Stick to longer, mixed-character passwords (eight or more characters in both capital and lower case letters); stay away from easily guessable personal clues such as pets' names; avoid dictionary words and instead purposefully misspell words.


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