In a new edition of “Oh my God, you can’t have that as a password”, it’s time to get acquainted with the most common security horrors that the average user employed to protect their accounts throughout 2014. As always, the credit goes to SplashData, which compiles millions of leaked passwords and ranks them by popularity.
What Makes a Password Strong?
Explaining this every year gets more tedious, because both we and hundreds of peer sites have covered it to exhaustion. A password must be strong. What exactly is a strong password? The easiest way to answer is to look at passwords that are not. A series of numbers is not strong. A random dictionary word is not strong. A name (whether common or personal) is not strong. And a combination of these three elements isn’t strong either. So what can we do? The first resource remains a password manager. LastPass is compatible with almost all platforms, and KeePass is extraordinary (also free and open source) as an offline solution. With these allies, the user only needs to remember one strong password and let the software generate the rest, using hundreds or even thousands of characters if the service supports it.
However… the user does not do it. In fact, they continue to apply true security tragedies in the name of convenience. The folks at SplashData had no better idea than to repeat their previous work and compile millions of passwords leaked publicly during 2014, in an attempt to expose (again) the gravity of the situation. Which password holds the top spot as the undisputed champion? Yes, you already know it: 123456. The second place is also the same as last year: password. And closing the podium, climbing a total of seventeen positions, appears a true avatar of effort and determination: 12345.
Curiously, the Top 25 has some new entries, but they are not surprising at all. Positions 8, 9, and 10 go to baseball, dragon (Game of Thrones?), and football (World Cup). The rest of the new members are mustang, access, master (any Doctor Who fan out there?), michael, superman (his duel with Batman is imminent), 696969, and batman (the same applies to the caped crusader with Superman).
abc123, letmein, 123123, 1234, qwerty… it’s almost as if they are begging to be hacked. I’d like to think that next year will be better, but that’s exactly what I thought at the start of 2014, and here we are. Many have called for the end of passwords. Microsoft thinks it’s more practical to separate them by priority, and other companies are trying to accelerate the adoption of biometric security. Be that as it may, seeing 123456 as the most popular password is a horror story that must end.
