LifeHacker’s 25 Worst Passwords Of 2017
We're heading into a new year, it's less than two weeks away. And with all the recent data breeches, especially at Yahoo, it's time to think about updating your internet passwords. I update mine regularly every few months. Makes things a little trickier to keep track of, but it's safer, so that's a plus. I highly recommend you at least update yours from "123456" or "password," if you're still relying on one of those to grant you access to your favorite sites. Those are the most common, and therefore the most hackable passwords, according to LifeHacker and SplashData.
A lot of the usual suspects are there, like sequential numbers (five of the top ten are sequential numbers), sequential letters, even sequential keystrokes (qwerty and qazwsx). Then you have to deal with common words like names, "password," or popular sports teams. Then you get into the pop culture ones. Star Wars, or starwars as it's stylized for password purposes. Seriously, the movie made $220million in a single weekend, it's popular, everyone knows what it is. Football and dragon both hit the top 25, and it rounds out with weird phrases like "letmein", "iloveyou" and "trustno1." SplashData has the full Top 100 worst passwords on their website.
So the times you think you're being clever, you maybe aren't being THAT clever. Especially if someone could just take a cursory glance around your home or office and figure out, "Oh, this guy's a Cardinals fan, I bet his password is GoCards2011."
Safest tips are to mix it up with letters and numbers. Don't use the same password for different things. And change your password regularly.