Last year wasn’t a great year for many industries. The aviation industry saw an extreme rare case of a country – Malaysia – lost three commercial planes. The oil and gas sector experienced the collapse of its black gold by more than 50%. Data security, meanwhile, saw hacking dominates the information technology sector – Apple iCloud celebrities photo leak, Sony hacks, Target and Home Depot security breaches and whatnot.

 

Like it or not, one of the major reasons why users data were compromised is due to “weak password”. Amazingly, but unsurprisingly, tons of users were using guessable passwords. And you can bet your last penny that they’re still using the same old and weak passwords today for obvious reason – easy to remember. It seems people are still a bunch of lazy creatures who couldn’t care about remembering a strong password for the sake of their data.

According to Splashdata, provider of the SplashID line of password management applications, the top-5 worst passwords are almost the same in 2014 as compared to previous year. Take for example “123456” and “password” – both these generic passwords top the chart in 2014 for the first and second place, as it did in 2013. The third worst password is “12345”, jumped 17 places for the third spot.

 

Fourth and fifth places for 2014 worst passwords go to “12345678” and “qwerty”, both dropped one spot as compared to 2013. The analysis of the 2014 worst passwords was compiled from more than 3.3 million leaked passwords during the year. There’re three new worst passwords that made it to the top-10 list though – “baseball”, “dragon”, and “football”. Other new worst passwords include “mustang”, “access”, “master”, “michael”, “superman”, “batman” and even “696969”.

But half of top-10 worst passwords were derived from the numerical “1” to “9”, with nine of the top 25 passwords on the 2014 list comprised numbers only. Interestingly, “iloveyou”  is one of the nine passwords from 2013 that didn’t make it to the 2014 top-25 list. Also in the top 100 are swear words and phrases, hobbies, famous athletes, car brands, and film names.

 

However, the passwords evaluated for the 2014 list were mostly held by users in North America and Western Europe. Hence, it’s unknown if Asians, Russians, Chinese or Indians share the same “laziness” when come to password protection. Here’s the biggest problem with such guessable passwords. If your password is in the list, chances are high that you’re using the same password for other access or login.

Hence, the typical chain of intrusions – such weak password in one of your accounts could be used to access your banking accounts, email accounts, trading accounts and the list goes on. The best practice is to use passwords of eight characters or more with mixed types of characters, not to mention avoid using the same username or password combination for multiple websites.

 

Here’re Top-25 worst passwords for 2014.

 

Rank	Password	Change from 2013
1	123456	No Change
2	password	No Change
3	12345	Up 17
4	12345678	Down 1
5	qwerty	Down 1
6	123456789	No Change
7	1234	Up 9
8	baseball	New
9	dragon	New
10	football	New
11	1234567	Down 4
12	monkey	Up 5
13	letmein	Up 1
14	abc123	Down 9
15	111111	Down 8
16	mustang	New
17	access	New
18	shadow	Unchanged
19	master	New
20	michael	New
21	superman	New
22	696969	New
23	123123	Down 12
24	batman	New
25	trustno1	Down 1

 

Other Articles That May Interest You …

• Hail Cyber Terrorism, Sony-Hollywood Surrenders Tamely To North Korea
• Security Tips From Edward Snowden – Get Rid Of Facebook, Google & Dropbox
• Biggest Celebrity Hacking Scandal – Nude Photos Of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton & 100 Other Celebrities
• Credit Card Safety Tips That You May Have Missed
• Despite Being Hacked, Malaysian Govt Shows Arrogance
• Watch Out China, 25% Of U.S. Hackers Are FBI Informer

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January 21st, 2015 by financetwitter

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