Tag: security

10 Passwords Everyone Uses (And You Shouldn’t)

passwordsThere’s one good outcome from the Yahoo breach (a hacker defeated Yahoo’s firewalls, stole 450,000 accounts, and proceeded to post the user names and passwords onlines). You know all that dire advice about using numbers and letters and symbols in passwords? Turns out the Yahoo users didn’t. A peek at their twenty favorite passwords makes it clear once more that the biggest impediment to computer security remains human users:

  1. 123456′ used by 1666 (0.38%)
  2. ‘password’ used by 780 (0.18%)
  3. welcome’ used by 436 (0.1%)
  4. ‘ninja’ used by 333 (0.08%)
  5. ‘abc123’ used by 250 (0.06%)
  6. ‘123456789’ used by 222 (0.05%)
  7. ‘12345678’ used by 208 (0.05%)
  8. ‘sunshine’ used by 205 (0.05%)
  9. ‘princess’ used by 202 (0.05%)
  10. ‘qwerty’ used by 172 (0.04%)

If you’re thinking this looks familiar, you’re right. Here are the top 25 from 2011:

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