Worst Password of 2018: Are you on the list?

With scores of accounts from social media to email to official accounts, it is a monumental task to remember the passwords for each of them. Lot of us choose to reuse passwords for multiple accounts, which by the way, is extremely risky, but some of us are hell-bent on what can be called “suicide by password”. They use extremely weak and predictable or popular passwords.

The more popular a password, the easier it becomes for hackers to hack your account, but to round it off, there are people who are just lazy, e.g. use “111111” as password.

Are you one of them? Take a look below.

Top 20 most popular (read worst) passwords of 2018

1) 123456
2) password
3) 123456789
4) 12345678
5) 12345
6) 111111
7) 1234567
8) sunshine
9) qwerty
10) iloveyou
11) princess
12) admin
13) welcome
14) 666666
15) abc123
16) football
17) monkey
19) 654321
20) !@#$%^&*

Full list is available here.

If you are one of them who is using any password above, then you are putting yourself at risk.

How to protect yourself from hackers and use secure passwords

You can use basic steps to do so as explained below.

Don’t reuse password

It is obvious but least followed rule of personal account security, DO NOT REUSE PASSWORDS.

Why? Because there are so many leaks and it is possible that an oboscure forum that you registered several years ago got hacked and the hackers for your username and password. If you reuse the passwords the hackers can now access any of your accounts using the same username and password

Use a password manager

There are several options out there, (e..g LastPass, etc.) but most browsers nowadays come with password storage and sync feature.

E.g. you can store and sync your passwords on Google Chrome using your gmail account.

Use a secure password

A secure password is one that is neither easy to guess, not easy to brute-force by trial and error.

Ideally, a password should be long (8 characters or more), have both uppercase and lowercase letters, include numbers, and have special characters. The most important of these being length of the password.

If you use Google Chrome, chrome automatically suggest secure passwords for some sites that you can use and also save within Chrome so you don’t have to remember it.

Do you follow any of these practices, have you been hacked in past. Tell us your experience in comments.

Source: SplashData