What’s your PaSsWoRd?
Lorelle VanFossen, writing in The Blog Herald, has a list of the most commonly used passwords.
- Middle name
- Names spelled backwards
- Phone numbers
- The word “password”
- Birthdays
- Single or combination uses of love, god, sex, and money, such as lovemoney or sexgod
- qwerty
- abc123
- password1
- asdf
- car license
- letmein
- yourname1
- default
Also, according to Roger Grimes of InfoWorld, quoted in the same piece, there are many Christian sounding - like, for example, ilovejesus - logon usernames combined with the worst-sounding cuss words.
The conclusion is that in the vast majority of cases, it is fairly easy to guess the passwords of most users.
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I expected many comments to this post - I found it curious and funny.
Like all of us, I need to have many passwords: one category includes names of artists, another names of universities, one is a place, one is an abstract word, one is made up with two words that I read on a sheet while thinking of a password, one was generated electronically etc etc. I have a good memory and remember at least fifteen combinations of usernames and passwords, although I tell myself that I should write them down somewhere, just in case I forgot.
What about yours?
jb says: I can’t count them, they just keep on increasing. Also, I can’t remember them. Eventually they fall off the end of my mind and float around the internet like dead stars. I’m forever filling in little forms which say I’ve forgotten it again, please send me the reminder/hint question about my mothers maiden name and my favourite colour of dog.
Sometimes that works, other times I have to abandon my access to that particular site altogether or join up again with a pseudonym and another user name and password which is destined for the same fate as the last one, no doubt about it.
I have reams of written lists giving me alternate user names and passwords for a variety of sites and, amazingly, none of them seem to work when I need them.
There must be a better system . . .