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Despite constantly hearing news about online hacks and cyber-crime, there are still some people out there with truly horrendous passwords. Time and time again, the importance of having a secure password has been drilled into people’s minds yet a variety of people even professional business people continue to use easy to hack passwords. The threat of hacks, identity theft and so on is not imaginary, and Africans are not immune. Passwords remain important in keeping your information safe, so for the love of the internet, have a complex password that won’t take thirty seconds to guess.
Recently, SplashData released a list of the worst passwords of 2014 and quite embarrassingly 123456 remains the most used password. It is misguided how people think that 123456 is the safest password because it is too obvious to guess. Wrong! If I was a hacker the first password I would type in would 123456. Other passwords that were included in the list are (in order of popularity):
- 123456
- password
- 12345
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 123456789
- 1234
- baseball
- dragon
- football
Yes, this list is real, as embarrassing as it looks and yes, people do indeed have ‘password’ as their password, and they probably think they are being clever too. Fortunately only 2.2% of the accounts have these sorts of passwords. However, if you are one of these people, start off this New Year with a smart password. In creating a password, either for your email or phone or whatever, do not use any birthdays, any family names, and if you insist on doing so because of poor memory, then include numerals, symbols and capital letters. A password like Juniper!390 is alright. Remember to constantly change it at least once every two months or if you are superbly paranoid, once a week. So please don’t start 2015 with ‘chelsea’ as your password, especially if you think your information is worth keeping secure.
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