Although this list has been out for a few months, it bears repeating that people are still using these easily hackable passwords. If your password is on the list of the 10 worst passwords from last year, it’s a really good time to change your password to something more secure.
Choosing a password that you can remember is important – we get it – but if your password is on the ‘horrible password’ list, you’re leaving your information at risk to hackers who are becoming more skilled and sophisticated every day. We’ll tell you more about creating secure passwords in a bit, but first, here are the worst passwords of 2013:
- 123456
- Password
- 12345678
- qwerty
- abc123
- 123456789
- 111111
- 1234567
- iloveyou
- adobe123
There are a couple of simple ways to create very secure passwords that will give hackers a run for their money.
- You can use an online secure password generator such as the one by Norton here. The only problem with using this type of service is that these passwords aren’t that easy to remember.
- Another method of secure password generation is to choose a sentence from your favorite book or a song lyric (I chose the Beatles’ “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away”) and use only the first letter of each word (yamtssfa). That password is a good one but you can make it even more secure by switching out letters for numerals and symbols. While you’re at it, be sure to throw in at least one capital letter. y@Mt55f@ is my end result.
So, how do you know if your password is secure enough? Microsoft has created a password guesser that you can use to test all of your passwords. If the letter is marked with a red X, that letter was guessed. If a letter is marked with a green checkmark, that letter was not guessed. It’s a handy tool and you should try it!
You can see the full list of the 25 Worst Passwords of 2013 in Kim Komando’s article.