Report reveals top 25 crackable passwords

by Steven Mostyn - Nov 21 2011, 08:00

If you’re serious about shielding personal data and preventing nefarious criminals from hacking into your online presence, it’s imperative that you embrace strong password protection.

In order to avoid rushing headlong into the clutches of those looking to fracture your privacy, your identity, and possibly even your bank account, SplashData has published a list of the 25 most vulnerable passwords.

In a world were personal data theft is increasingly common, it shocks us to our security-loving core that a report even needs to be produced to inform the public that ‘Password’ and ‘Passw0rd’ rank as two of the worst possible password selections.

But then, education in this area will hopefully stymie continued ignorance. To that end, we’re only too happy to push SplashData’s message and reiterate that passwords such as ‘qwerty’ or ‘123456’ are likely to be among the first to fall where intrusion is concerned.

Other easily cracked passwords to avoid—or change immediately—include the likes of ‘qazwsx’, ‘123123’ ‘abc123’, ‘111111’ and ‘654321’.

The list does carry some seemingly less predictable entries (i.e., ‘shadow’, ‘letmein’, ‘superman’ and ‘football’) but SplashData warns against using them all the same.

“Hackers can easily break into many accounts just by repeatedly trying common passwords,” commented SplashData chief executive Morgan Slain.

“Even though people are encouraged to select secure, strong passwords, many people continue to choose weak, east-to-guess ones, placing themselves at risk from fraud and identity theft,” he added.

In order to practice improved security, we here at The Tech Herald recommend readers include a blend of numbers, letters and special characters into their passwords (where possible—not all portals allow special characters).

Also try not to use the same password across multiple websites and always push password length to at least eight characters. Remember that the longer and more varied passwords are, the harder they are to crack.

Other passwords to avoid include: ‘sunshine’; ‘monkey’; ‘trustno1’; ‘dragon’; ‘baseball’; ‘iloveyou’; ‘master’; ‘sunshine’; ‘ashley’; ‘bailey’ and ‘michael’.

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