The worst passwords of 2016 are as lazy as ever
January 14, 2017 – 7:00 AMIt seems that password security simply doesn’t work.
Many of us rely on simple, easy-to-remember strings of characters and letters, including strings found on your keyboard such as “1234567” or “qwertyu.”
While these strings are easy for you to remember, they are also no trouble at all for attackers to brute-force hacking techniques — or little more than a guess or two — to compromise your online accounts and take over your digital identity.
Online vendors and agencies are getting up to speed with these practices and now often offer or require two-factor authentication which connects a mobile phone to your account — or will ban soft, easy passwords like this altogether.
But as many are, many are not — and it is both companies and individuals that are at fault for lax security at the first stage.
According to Keeper Security’s annual list of commonly used passwords, we still haven’t got the message.
The security company’s researchers were left shaking their heads in despair as they discovered that the most common passwords used to protect our accounts have not changed much at all — and “123456” is still very much in existence.
The company scoured through 10 million passwords which became public domain over the year thanks to data breaches.
Keeper Security found that almost 17 percent of users insisted on using “123456” to ‘protect’ their accounts from intrusion, while “123456789,” “qwerty” and “password” also make an appearance in the top 25 worst passwords found — which, sadly, are also the most common.
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