Cheadle and Gatley Lib Dems are moving
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by Lib Dem team on 20 January, 2016
Cyber-crime is growing with more and more people suffering theft, identity theft or at least inconvenience. Just a few weeks ago I had to get a new debit card when someone tried to use it (I guess some dodgy copy) to pay for a hotel bill in the United States. Luckily the bank software saw it as unusual enough to decline, but I’ve still had the inconvenience of several days without a debit card and months of having to change online payment details.
So what can be done? For most of us, going offline isn’t an option. Online shopping is just too convenient for lots of things. There are measures the police could be taking (as they aren’t very good at tackling cyber-crime at the moment) and we’ll come back to those another time.
For now, something simple. Here are the 25 most common passwords in use in 2015. If you use one of these, an attacker can break into your account in a fraction of a second – in reality you might as well not bother having a password at all as it would be no less secure.
The 25 most-used passwords (change from 2014)
1. 123456 (unchanged)
2. password (unchanged)
3. 12345678 (up 1)
4. qwerty (up 1)
5. 12345 (down 2)
6. 123456789 (unchanged)
7. football (up 3)
8. 1234 (down 1)
9. 1234567 (up 2)
10. baseball (down 2)
11. welcome (new)
12. 1234567890 (new)
13. abc123 (up 1)
14. 111111 (up 1)
15. 1qaz2wsx (new)
16. dragon (down 7)
17. master (up 2)
18. monkey (down 6)
19. letmein (down 6)
20. login (new)
21. princess (new)
22. qwertyuiop (new)
23. solo (new)
24. passw0rd (new)
25. starwars (new)
The best way to pick a secure password? Simply pick three or four random words and put them together. You might need to include a number and capital letter just to get it accepted, but whether you do or not it’s pretty secure. You can probably come up with random words yourself, but here’s a website that can do it for you.
5 Comments
Whatever you chose DON’T WRITE IT DOWN.
That’s a bit more of an open question. We’ve spent years telling people not to write down passwords, but 99.9% of the attacks we see are automated ones from people who will probably never set foot on the same continent as you, never mind go through your handbag searching for passwords. I’d say it was far safer to have a difficult-to-crack password written down than to have an obvious one that’s simple enough that you don’t need to write it down.
Security expert Bruce Schnier suggested writing it down isn’t a bad way as we carry things of value around with us all the time (ie called money!). You’d also realise when you’d lost your wallet reasonably quickly
https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2010/11/bruce_schneier_write.html
He might be unhappy about people who write it down on a piece of paper stuck under their keyboard though
I just added two layer security to my iPad and was given a ‘key’ and told to write it down somewhere safe!
It seems that we are trusting ink on paper in a safe place more than we trust storing anything on our computers.
I also read that the first thing we must do is encrypt our data – so use a coded way of storing the password – so ‘1st friend at second school nickname’ is a good memory jogger for the name of that password and if stolen, it can’t be cracked unless you share this personal info.
I agree that it is better to have more complicated passwords written down than easy to hack passwords.
I found I had so many, 60 or 70, that I had to write them down in a book, so I made them more complicated. However, some are so complicated, with upper case, numbers and special characters that even with them written down in front of me I sometimes misread them! I could never remember half of them.
Of course now that book is very valuable. My wife dreads what would happen if I lost it! I do hide it safely away when I go on holiday with other valuables etc. and I have duplicates for the most important but now I’m thinking about it I’ll make an entire copy to be completely safe.