Technology companies, banks, websites and security researchers have been trying for a while now to kill the password.
Passwords are easy to steal if they’re weak to begin with!
Other forms of biometric authentication gaining popularity include faces, irises, gestures and voices.
We know that passwords are often very poorly secured by those with a responsibility to store them safely, and breaches of password databases have become so common that it takes a really big one to get our attention.
People have hopefully are being taught to create unique, complex and hard-to-guess passwords.
But when you look at the list of most commonly used passwords, it’s very obvious that there are plenty of people who haven’t got, or understood the message.
Earlier this year, the password management company SplashData released a list of the 25 worst passwords, ranked based on how often they appeared in published lists of passwords hacked in the past year.
The top two most common passwords (and therefore, the worst) are “123456” and “password.”
Now, SplashData has come out with a list of the top 10 worst sports passwords, taken from the top 100 most common passwords.
This year’s worst sports passwords are:
- football
- baseball
- hockey
- soccer
- golfer
- yankees
- jordan
- chelsea
- rangers
- nascar
These passwords would be at the top of any cybercriminal’s list of passwords to use for breaking into email, banking, social media and other valuable accounts.
It’s tempting to poke fun at people who choose such bad passwords, but even really smart people and people who should know better have bad password habits.
If you need a refresher on creating good passwords, watch our short video that not only shows you how to pick a proper password, but also explains why you should bother.
Our take on Worst Passwords:
It’s long past time that we didn’t have to keep repeating the password lesson, but research continues to show us that weak passwords are NOT going away. If you don’t embrace impossible to remember password (and using a password manager) – then please select strong password. Do NOT re-use passwords. We think this task makes a password manager essential, but you may well be able to remember hundreds of unique passwords. We know that we can’t! 🙁