123456 Please Change Your Password

One would believe in this day and age where people are aware of cyber security, they would be a bit more careful about choosing the passwords they use. However it seems that millions of people still use the extremely generic 123456 as their account password.

The study was conducted by the National Cyber Security Centre in the United Kingdom and BBC reported that the first cyber survey analysed public databases to see which words, phrases and strings people used most commonly. Nearly 23 million accounts used 123456 as the password.

Other popular strings included “123456789”, again easy to crack, “qwerty”, “111111111” and “password”. They were found in the top five passwords being used by people. Ian Levy the technical director of NCSC said that using such passwords left people open to being hacked.

Another trend was to use famous football teams such as Liverpool and Chelsea as the password. Also popular was the name Ashley followed by Michael, Daniel, Jessica and Charlie. The scientific study shows that people are not as concerned about their cyber security as they should be.

A strong password is always a combination of words and numbers. A few random characters may be added so that it may not be cracked easily. The longer a password is, the more difficult it is to hack.