The importance of a strong password

Password management company SplashData has released its annual list of the worst passwords of the 2014. The company analyzed 3.3 million stolen and least secure passwords of the past year for the list. According to the report “123456″ and “password” still top the list of the most unsecure passwords. Other commonly used passwords in the top 25 list are ‘qwerty’, ‘football’, and ‘access’.

In light of the recent security breaches at Sony and iCloud it is increasingly important to ensure that you choose a strong password. Microsoft have published guidelines on how to come up with a strong password and what it should contain:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-vista/tips-for-creating-a-strong-password

What makes a password strong (or weak)?

A strong password:

• Is at least eight characters long.
• Does not contain your user name, real name, or company name.
• Does not contain a complete word.
• Is significantly different from previous passwords.
• Contains characters from each of the following four categories; uppercase characters, lowercase characters, numbers, symbols.

A password might meet all the criteria above and still be a weak password. For example, Hello2U! meets all the criteria for a strong password listed above, but is still weak because it contains a complete word. H3ll0 2 U! is a stronger alternative because it replaces some of the letters in the complete word with numbers and also includes spaces.

Presenting SplashData’s “Worst Passwords of 2014”:

Rank	Password	Change from 2013
1	123456	No Change
2	password	No Change
3	12345	Up 17
4	12345678	Down 1
5	qwerty	Down 1
6	123456789	No Change
7	1234	Up 9
8	baseball	New
9	dragon	New
10	football	New
11	1234567	Down 4
12	monkey	Up 5
13	letmein	Up 1
14	abc123	Down 9
15	111111	Down 8
16	mustang	New
17	access	New
18	shadow	Unchanged
19	master	New
20	michael	New
21	superman	New
22	696969	New
23	123123	Down 12
24	batman	New
25	trustno1	Down 1