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About a month ago, I got a text from my brother that said ‘Dude, what’s up with your recent Facebook activity?’ I logged on to find that someone had hacked into my account and changed my profile picture to Alicia Keys with a goatee and posted a video on my timeline of aliens snorting cocaine accompanied with the caption ‘My weekend be like…’. Ok, that part wasn’t too far off, which makes it even scarier.
But hacking can be far worse than a couple profile update that make you look like a boner to all your friends and family. Many of us have been on the short end of a fraudulent bank account attack, where we have to file a claim, cancel our cards, and audit our statements going forward. That shit’s for the birds.
In any event, tech experts from online electrical retailer AO.com have revealed the ten most commonly used passwords, including a couple that would take less than one second to crack.
Via Daily Mail:
The easiest passwords to crack:
123456 1234567890
123456789 1234567
qwerty password
12345678 123123
111111 987654321
While some think choosing passwords based on memorable words makes you bulletproof, this idea couldn’t be any further from the truth. Hackers will go after personal information such as a date of birth, pet’s name or the street you grew up on, which can easily be pulled from social media profiles.
Words to avoid in your passwords:
Your name, partner’s or pet’s name
Your pet’s name
The name of the street you grew up on
Your favorite place to go on vacation
Favorite sports team
Daily Mail reports that xxperts from the Home Office’s Cyber Aware campaign advise choosing a password that’s made up of three random, unrelated words such as ‘teabrownpicture,’ which would take 35,000 years to crack. Adding a number will add complicate things by 227 million years.
Experts also advise that although it may be difficult to juggle, one should have different passwords for different accounts (i.e. online banking and social media).