If you can count to 10, you can crack most passwords. That seems to be the case by looking at most of the thousands of leaked Windows Live ID passwords last week – they very often are just simple number combinations such as “123456”, birth dates or names. Passwords that can easily be found out – or guessed.
It’s not just Hotmail users being careless with security. Phishers have also leaked a list with more than 20,000 usernames and passwords from Gmail, Yahoo and AOL – showing the same easy passwords, in way too many cases.
123456
Security firm Acunetix had a look at the Hotmail-list of leaked passwords. Among some of the most common passwords you will find “123456”, “123456789”, “1111111”. Out of the 10,000 passwords, 42% were lower-case letters. Only 6% used a combination of letters and numbers – which is a safer way of creating your password.
The longest password supposedly is 30 characters long: “lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo” and the shortest is “)” – but I wonder how it’s even possible to create such a short password, it shouldn’t be.
Change Passwords Frequently
Security experts often recommends users to change their password frequently – especially after events like those recently where lots of passwords have been leaked.
So I’ll end this article by recommending you to change your most important passwords today! Use a combination of letters and numbers – and if possible, include characters such as “!”, “.” etc. You can also do a combination of lower-case and upper-case letters, most systems nowadays supports case sensitive passwords.
Can’t agree more on this one Klaus. Changing passwords frequently and having it strong at the same time, will definitely increase ones security and prevent them from identity thefts, etc. With so many accounts that one has today, having different passwords can drive a person crazy, not to mention “forget” them. I do not usually do this type of promotion while commenting, but I believe in addition to this, an article I wrote way back will greatly help your readers to create strong and unique passwords at the same time – the easy way:). The article: http://internet.iblogzone.com/2009/06/create-strong-and-unique-password.html
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Thanks for the link to your password-article, hopefully it will help somebody 🙂 But I’m afraid the bigger part of those with very easy passwords, are not the typical blog reader (especially not the comments section anyway) – but we can always hope!
.-= Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Membership Site: How To Find Out What Your Members Want Before You Launch =-.
Changing passwords frequently and using a combination of special characters, alphabets and numbers as a password is advised.
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Absolutely. We really need some kind of “drivers license” for new internet users so they will learn how to not only spot phishing sites but also to keep a strong password 🙂
.-= Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Woman Arrested For Virtual Poke On Facebook =-.
Hahah! I am using a long password for each websites I am using.
Yes. Actually we should aware of our online accounts and passwords. Caz a child can crack us via key-logger or phishing.