My buddy, an expert in computer networks, came over to help me with my computer. I left him in front of my computer while I went to get him something to drink. When I came back, he was already in my computer without me telling him the password. I asked him, “How did you get in?” He replied, “Most people use their pet’s name as a password, so I tried that first.” Whew, I sure made it easy for him. I’d read something about how code were created during World War II and decided to apply a simplified system similar to that for my own password creation. For one thing, I started using a dead pet’s name. Here’s an article showing more on the folly of our ways when picking passwords that make it easy for hackers to get into our accounts:

According to a report, most users still haven’t responded to the call by security experts to implement more robust passwords. In fact, in a list of the most easily hacked passwords, simply typing ’123456′ took a truly forgettable top prize.

Security firm Imperva recently published its list of the passwords easiest to be hacked based on 32,000,000 instances of successful hacking. Imperva named their report “Consumer Password Worst Practices,” and some of the entries near the top are so predictable that they could easily lead to theft or identity fraud.

The Ten Worst Passwords

The following is a list of the most predictable passwords; these shouldn’t be used ever (Source: pcworld.com):

1. 123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. Password

5. iloveyou

6. princess

7. rockyou

8. 1234567

9. 12345678

10. abc123

Make Your Passwords a Lot Better:

Other key findings in the report: it seems that almost 1 in 3 users choose passwords comprised of six or fewer characters; more than half use passwords based on only alpha-numeric characters; and almost 50 per cent used variations on their name, popular slang terms, or simple strings of consecutive characters from the average QWERTY keyboard — such as ‘asdfg’.

Imperva has made several obvious recommendations, suggesting most users adopt passwords with at least eight characters and to mix those characters between upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Passwords should be simple enough that they won’t be too easily forgotten. What you want to do is make cracking your code a very high degree of difficulty for either an unknown or known hacker.

About this article: Dennis Faas is the CEO and Chief editor of Infopackets.com: a daily, digital publication dedicated to MS Windows, computing, technology trends and solutions to real life computing issues: all written in simple English. Subscription to Infopackets Windows Newsletter is free. Visit us today! www.infopackets.com

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