The Worlds Worst Passwords of 2017

With hackers and cyber-crime forever on the rise, its no longer really ‘optional’ to use specific safety measures to ensure that your data stays safe. Right the way from encrypting files to simple things like passwords, its all vital to protecting whats virtually precious.

While surfing the web (I know, I bet you haven’t heard that term in years) earlier today, I came across a list of the worst passwords of 2016. Tempted by the hilarity of topic, I decided to click through. To my amazement, it appears that for the last 6 years in a row, ‘123456’ and ‘password’ have been the worlds worst passwords by a country mile, securing the top spots. Closely followed by ‘12345’ and ‘12345678’. I guess in some respects, people are reluctant to believe that their data is secure as long as they are safe and sensible online. Then again, most of these people are probably stuck in the mindset of ‘its never happened to me before, its fine’. According to studies, it appears that up to 10% of us our still using at least one password from the list below, with a worrying 4% of us still using the worlds worst password – the dreaded ‘123456’.

On top of this, it is extremely important to outline the fact that altering a simple word by just one character (like number 18 on the list) will only hold a hacker back from the inevitable by about 4-5 minutes, sometimes if that.

 

The List of shame:

 

1. 123456
2. password
3. 12345
4. 12345678
5. football
6. qwerty
7. 1234567890
8. 1234567
9. Princess
10. 1234
11. login
12. welcome
13. Solo
14. abc123
15. admin
16. 121212
17. flower
18. passw0rd
19. dragon
20. sunshine
21. master
22. Hottie
23. loveme
24. zaq1zaq1
25. password1

 

Top tips for secure passwords:

 

Although you’ve probably heard these tips a hundred times, they aren’t floating around the internet for no reason. Make sure you use a mixture of upper and lower case characters, number and special characters. Try making your password 8 characters long, at least.

Avoid using the same credentials for different websites, as this will give hackers the ultimate foot in the door for robbing you blind online.

Dashlane is a great tool for storing passwords that are hard to remember, allowing you to access all of them at once. All you require is one password to login (strongly advised that you have an extremely secure password for Dashlane). Dashlane does not hold a password recovery service, so hackers cannot steal other credentials in order to access it.

If you want to find out more about Dashlane and how it can benefit your business, give Lucidica a call!

Lucidica is the IT support team for London businesses.