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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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