With all the talk of high-level hacking, it’s easy to forget that it is we who make ourselves most vulnerable on a very individual level. SplashData, a leading provider of security applications and services, recently compiled a list of the 25 most common passwords in the United States today. Do not use these on confidential e-mail accounts!
1 123456
2 password
3 12345
4 12345678
5 qwerty
6 123456789
7 1234
8 baseball
9 dragon
10 football
11 1234567
12 monkey
13 letmein
14 abc123
15 111111
16 mustang
17 access
18 shadow
19 master
20 michael
21 superman
22 696969
23 123123
24 batman
25 trustno1
These are the first passwords that a criminal would try when attempting to hack your account. Other types of passwords you want to avoid are birthdays and the names of your children or spouse.
I have had some particularly creative passwords over the years. In the past, I’ve used an employee ID number from a company I worked at in the ’70s. Then I came up with an even better idea, which I can’t divulge for obvious security reasons! The key is to create a password that is unrelated to anything someone might be able to find out about you if they were digging into your background.
