For better or worse, passwords are the basis of much of the security we use in the cloud.
SplashData put out there “worst password of 2011” report, based on a blind review of their database of common passwords. If you use any of these on any accounts you wish to protect, clearly a good idea to think about changing them soon.
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- qwerty
- abc123
- monkey
- 1234567
- letmein
- trustno1
- dragon
- baseball
- 111111
- iloveyou
- master
- sunshine
- ashley
- bailey
- passw0rd
- shadow
- 123123
- 654321
- superman
- qazwsx
- michael
- football
A few simple guidelines for good passwords, from around the web:
- Use at least eight characters
- Use a random mixture of characters, upper and lower case, numbers, punctuation, spaces and symbols.
- Don’t use a word found in any dictionary, English or foreign.
Stuff that just doesn’t work well, at least not anymore, because common hacker tools know them well:
- Don’t merely add a single digit or symbol before or after a word. e.g. “password1″
- Don’t double a single word. e.g. “kittykitty”
- Don’t just reverse a word. e.g. “drowssap”, or just remove the vowels. e.g. “psswrd”
- Avoid Keyboard sequences that can easily be repeated. e.g. “qwerty”,”zxcvf” etc.
- Don’t garble letters into numbers as the only thing between you and the dictionary, e.g. converting e to 3, L or i to 1, o to 0. as in “z3r0-10v3″
Read more about the Splashdata report in full here: http://splashdata.com/splashid/worst-passwords/index.htm
Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cybersecurity, security
