Remembering passwords is a pain that most of us don’t want to take. Needless to say that our lackadaisical attitude makes hacking our online accounts a cake-walk for hackers, who are fishing for flaws in the online system to encash its vulnerabilities.
Apparently, senior lecturer in Computing at Lancaster University, Dr Jeff Yan, compiled a list of top ten most popular password from a leaked Yahoo database and ones that made it to the list will blow your minds away.
The most popular passwords that were featured in the leak are ‘123456’ and ‘password’, which were followed by ‘welcome’ and ‘ninja’. Next up in the list were ‘abc123’ and ‘123456789’.
If you think these weren’t trivial enough here’s more. ‘12345678’, ‘sunshine’, ‘princess’ and ‘qwerty’ also remained some of the most popular passwords that made it to the list.
According to Dr Yan, unawareness about online security threats could be the primary reason why people continue using such simple passwords.
Passwords you should never use (Photo: Wikimedia)
So, how can protect my online accounts from the hacker?
There are several ways to protect your account. Apart from using multiple layers of authentication, the easiest way to doing this is having a strong password that cannot be guessed easily and is made of characters, numbers and symbols.
How can I make a strong password?
Forming a strong password is not a rocket science. You just need to be clear and clever enough have a string which is both easy to remember and difficult to guess.
Here are some tips to forming a strong password:
– Use at least 8 to 10 characters in your password
– Use a combination of letters in lower case, upper case, numbers and special symbols
– Avoid picking up names of people, birthdays, places
– Use information that is exclusively known to you
– Use iterations and combine it with alphanumeric characters and special symbols
Extra byte: Keep changing your password every six months and do not use the same password for multiple accounts.
