I’m almost embarrassed to admit how old school I am. But I’m still willing to learn, so I was quite interested in reading an article on the “25 Worst Passwords” to see how many of mine showed up on the list.
According to “SplashID” a company that produces password management software, the most frequently used password is… “password.” And coming in at number 18 is “passw0rd,” using a zero for the “O”, so even though letters and numbers are both used, it’s pretty lame. And quite hackable.
And speaking of letters and numbers, “abc123” ranked number 5, coming in right behind “querty.” Numbers two and three were all numbers: “123456” and “12345678” respectively. Again, not very original.
The article suggested that you use at least 12 keystrokes for your passwords, mixing upper and lower case letters, spaces, underscores and symbols. And naturally, it is NOT WISE to use the same password for all your accounts!
All of this is well and good, but I’m finding that with so many different websites and passwords and so forth, I can’t seem to remember a single one of them without looking up my Master Password List, which is not, by the way, named “Master Password List!”
In fact, none of my passwords showed up in the top 25, and I’m feeling pretty happy about that. Not smug, mind you, and not confident that I can’t be hacked, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that the bad guys will need more than 30 seconds to create another Jan Bono on Facebook.
As if one old school dinosaur were not enough!