I decided to Google for "silly passwords" and found a multitude of links. Just taking one example, I found it had a list of what it claimed are the 10 silliest passwords of all time. They are:
1) 123456. Yes, since most passwords need to have six characters... I suppose variations would be abcdef, uvwxyz, etc.
2) abc123. This one is thought up because the advice is given to make the password more secure by making it "alpha-numeric" ie having a combination of letters and numbers.
3) charlie. For some reason, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, Charlie is the most popular password name if a given name is used. Over here, I wonder if we have ahlian, ahbeng, abdullah (ahmad is too short with just five characters) and sammyvelu, etc.
4) monkey. Again, for some reason, "monkey" is a favourite animal-based password.
5) manchesteru (or reddevils), liverpool, chelsea, etc. So, you are a soccer fan. Mr Hacker hopes you are.
6) facebook1, google1, etc. So you think adding "1" makes it more secure?
7) your name 1. Ditto.
8) password1. Unbelievable as it is, this is cited as a common password.
9) letmein. This seems to be a variation of opensesame, and a figure of one in 550 people was cited as using this.
10) qwerty. Why? Look at the keyboard, mate. I siuppose variations on this theme would be asdfgh and zxcvbn, etc (depending on how your keyboard layout is arranged).
Incidentally, 13 April will be marked as "Singapore 1st Cyber Security Awareness Day" (see the adverstising feature in TODAY, 28 March, page 7). The write-up about this event has this interesting fact:
"Strong passwords usually comprise at least eight letters in upper and lower case, numbers and symbols. A hacker takes about four days to randomly guess an eight-character password if letters are all in lower case, three years if they are upper and lower case, and 463 years if all permutations including symbols and numbers are used."
So, there!
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