Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The worst passwords revealed by Google


Every once in a while, lists of the absolutely worst passwords are published. These passwords are typically gathered by analyzing the databases of user passwords and the most frequently used ones are then attributed to also be the worst passwords.


Password security lockA lot of our lives revolve around passwords, however, humans seem to have an intrinsic difficulty to actually come up with good passwords which certainly is alarming. Google has recently conducted interviews of 2000 individuals regarding their habits when it comes to choosing and creating a password.

The results showed that many people are still creating passwords based on some parts of their own personal or social life. However, these things are today easily deducible by a third party with the availability of social networks such as Facebook and other networks. In addition, the study also shows carelessness when it comes to protecting even rather secure passwords. For example, more than half of the interviewed individuals claim that they have at some point shared their passwords with a third party and 3% claim that they have the password written down on a post-it note next to the computer!

After analyzing how the interviewed individuals chose and created their passwords, Google has published the top 10 list of the most common password types which obviously are to be avoided for everyone who is concerned about security.

Table of the top 10 most common password types


Top 10 most common password types
1.Name of pet
2.An important date, for example, the wedding date
3.Birthday of a family member
4.Name of a child
5.Name of a family member
6.Place of birth
7.Favourite holiday
8.Something related to a favourite team
9.Name of partner
10.The word "password"

When it comes to choosing password, again it is clear that passwords that are not derived from the personal life or social life of a person and are not based on a word from a dictionary is by far the most secure. In addition, adding upper case letters, numbers and symbols should be common practice to ensure maximum strength of the passwords.


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