The top 25 worst passwords have been released by SplashData, a company responsible for a popular password management application. The passwords on that list include some real shockers, such as “123456,” the ever imaginative “12345678”, the even more creative “111111”, and even a couple of heroes with “batman” and “superman” listed.
All of these sit under the number one most used and awful password which is, simply put, “password”.
It shouldn’t be hard to guess why these are so bad: they’re predictable!
If you have one of these passwords in use for your email, internet banking, Facebook, or anything, change it immediately.
To make your password more secure, you can throw in an assortment of numbers, punctuation, and capital letters, replacing parts of the password with similar looking yet different characters.
For instance, “password” can actually have a few characters changed to become the more secure “p@S$w0rD!”, replacing the “a” with an “@”, a lowercase “s” with an uppercase “S”, switching another “s” to a “$”, making the “o” into a zero, making the “d” into an uppercase “D”, and finishing it offer with an exclamation mark.
If this all seems too hard, try making some letters uppercase, some lowercase, and replacing an “e” with the number 3 or the letter “a” with an “@”. Using this idea, commonly used passwords such as “michael” and “ashley” can become “MICha3l” and “AShl3y”. Substitute letters of your own password for more secure versions, but make sure to remember your changes.
Try to make sure that your password has a minimum of eight characters, and if you’re missing a few, add an umber that holds special meaning to you and follow it up with a “!”
This is a good article but still doesn’t hit the nail on the head because all those symbol p@s5wordS:twitter ! are still crackable by brute force attacks.Â
Even more secure and easier to remember is simply a few random words strung together. Such as “bigfluffycar” or “mediumsizediguana”. Combine that with a couple of symbols and you have a super password: “medium5izedigiun@” would be very very hard to crack.
I wonder how many people will now have the password : medium5izedigiun@”
Probably thousands.
This is a good article but still doesn’t hit the nail on the head because all those symbol p@s5wordS:twitter ! are still crackable by brute force attacks.Â
Even more secure and easier to remember is simply a few random words strung together. Such as “bigfluffycar” or “mediumsizediguana”. Combine that with a couple of symbols and you have a super password: “medium5izedigiun@” would be very very hard to crack.