Year after year we hear and frown over the yearly word passwords lists, which are shockingly also among the most-used ones around. The ones to make it to the top are more or less the same as last year, and the ones before it.
How Bad Were the Passwords in 2015?
The password which ruled the roost in 2015 was unsurprisingly “123456”, followed by “password” according to a list compiled by SplashData.
On the rise this year were passwords “12345678” and “qwerty” which beat out “12345”. It would appear that people are getting more conscious about their security by…. taking the most-convenient route as always: add further characters.
Obviously, these longer passwords are more or less just as easy to guess as the ones they replace.
Some New Trends in Password Making Discovered in 2015
The usage of sports names remained the common trend in 2015, with “Football” now climbing three ranks to become the 7th most common password, followed by “baseball” at no. 10.
Several new entries made it into the top 25 list for the first time, including “welcome”, the absurdly-long “1234567890”, and the highly-complex “1qaz2wsx”, which upon closer scrutiny is just made of the first two columns of the keyboard.
Tips to Remember When Thinking Up Passwords
The first step would be to use passwords made of at least 12 characters with a mixture of letters and numbers. Avoid using similar passwords on multiple sites. Finally, use a password manager like LastPass to protect, organize and suggest ambiguous looking passwords.
Here’s a cool infographic representing passwords in 2015:
Some sties now enforce passwords like one lower case, one higher car, one numerical and one special character. They are annoying to make and use for first few times, but once you get comfortable, they are highly secure. So should use such combinations also for sites where these are not enforced via validation.
For developers, they must never save non-encryped passwords but hashs which could not be decrypted but just matched when user signs in.
The real question is ‘How they know my password?”.
Such passwords are guessable.
But you can’t throw a report on ‘guess’.
I hate passwords
I love long passwords 22 characters minimum???
12345678901234567890123 ???? :-D
Okay these are pretty amusing. Thankfully, none of my passwords are on the list, whew!