Passwords Made Easy

February 10, 2009

By Dr. Rus

Can You Be Easily Hacked?

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Just how safe are you on-line?

Just when you think you’ve found the perfect password, someone comes along and figures out how to decipher it! Programs abound offering new password tricks. But with so many sites asking for passwords, it gets confusing remembering what your password is. People write their passwords down and hide them under the desk blotter. Others put them all into a Word document and save them on their computer. But, if you have an on-line backup, what happens if someone hacks into your backup files? Suddenly your password list is available!

Then we have multiple password safety sites on-line. These sites offer the user a “safe” place to store all their various passwords. Some even offer ways to automatically change your password once a month.

While this sounds like a wonderful idea…
just how safe are those sites?

Password Database Hacked!

Setting a password on your computer is not as easy as one, two, three. Someone recently hacked into the database for the PHPBB Dot Com site and stole 20,000 passwords. Robert Graham, a computer analyst got a list of the passwords and then proceeded to study them for any trends.

Here’s what he found:

The most popular password was 123456. That accounted for 3% of all 20,000 passwords. The second most popular password was the word password.
The words dragon, monkey, master and killer were each in the top 20 for most common passwords.
4% of all passwords featured a version of the word password.
16% of passwords included a person’s first name. Joshua was the most common first name used in such cases.
35% of passwords were six characters long.