SafePasswd Blog

Here’s an interesting graphic of the worst passwords ever.

Please don’t ever use those. They are unsafe and just begging to be hacked. Generate a secure and safe password. Passwords can be easy to remember.

This is an interesting analysis on passwords:

A scary 92% of people use the same password across all websites including their email accounts this is the finding of a short research project we did for a client recently.

That’s why we suggest using more memorable and secure passwords so that you can keep one for email, and another for things that don’t need as much security (paywall news sites, etc.)

CXO has some more analysis of the passwords from the RockYou hacking, and the results are pretty interesting. Just a slightly better password quality puts you leaps and bounds over the majority of passwords out there.

This is why SafePasswd.com offers a memorable password option. It’s simple to remember and immediately offers an improvement over what most people choose on their own.

At one point Facebook had a master password that could be used to enter any account. “Chuck Norris”. This is no longer used.

TechCrunch notes that we can’t say 100% for certain that this is true. It is however not an unheard method of giving admin rights to engineers, especially early on.

[Via The Rumpus.net]

An analysis of 32 million passwords stolen by a hacker from RockYou (who makes games for Facebook and other social networks) found that the quality of passwords chosen by users is extremely poor. From the article:

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

Odds are most of those users had the same password for their email and Facebook accounts meaning they are quite vulnerable unless they take action and change their password. Most likely won’t even bother.

That’s why we suggest using a password generator to generate a strong unique and memorable password. SafePasswd will give you a unique password that can easily be 12 or more characters long. You can fine tune what it contains (words, random characters, case sensitivity) to accommodate your needs and your memory abilities. Pick the strongest you feel you can remember.

TechCrunch has a list of passwords that can’t even be used with Twitter. Using these generic easy to guess passwords is an invitation to being hacked. That’s why we recommend you always use a stronger password.

It’s easy to write a brute force attack script that will simply try the most popular passwords, that’s why websites have had to come up with countermeasures such as this.

So use a password generator that gives you a secure and memorable password that isn’t banned.