20 Popular and Easy to Guess Passwords
If you want to protect your online accounts from hackers, rule number one is to select strong, hard to guess passwords.
However, recent reports, suggests that many Internet users are still relying on the same kind of predictable passwords that they used a decade ago.
Password strength
Impervia released a list of the top 20 passwords, which were found when RockYou.com was hacked last month. According to Impervia, these were strikingly similar to the passwords used on Hotmail.com, when that too was breached almost 20 years ago!
Starting with the most commonly used, the 20 most popular passwords were:
- 123456
- 12345
- 123456789
- Password
- iloveyou
- princess
- rockyou
- 1234567
- 12345678
- abc123
- Nicole
- Daniel
- babygirl
- monkey
- Jessica
- Lovely
- michael
- Ashley
- 654321
- Qwerty
It’s clear for all to see that many people are still using predictable strings of letters and numbers and names as their passwords. Obviously, if you are using ANY of these, it’s a good idea to change it for a stronger password; to avoid the risk of a brute force attack.
Password tips
A pdf on the Impervia website gives some more detail AND some good advice on how to build strong, memorable, passwords:
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The password you choose must contain at least eight characters
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Your passwords must contain a combination of different types of characters— numbers, lower case letters, upper case letter, and special characters such as !*,;@%^&#$”
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Do not use a name or any word in the dictionary when choosing your passwords.
