Passwords that show no imagination or distinctiveness are easy prey for information pirates, a new US study says. <\/p>\n
A statistical analysis of 28 000 passwords recently stolen from a popular US website and posted on the internet reveals that people often do the easy thing. <\/p>\n
It found that 16% took a first name as a password, often their own or one of their children, according to the study published by Information Week. <\/p>\n
Another 14% relied on the easiest keyboard combinations to remember such as "1234" or "12345678." <\/p>\n
For those using English keyboards, "QWERTY", was popular. Likewise, "AZERTY" scored with people with European keyboards. <\/p>\n
Five percent of the stolen passwords were names of television shows or stars popular with young people like "hannah," inspired by singer Hannah Montana. "Pokemon," "Matrix," and "Ironman" were others. <\/p>\n
The word "password," or easy to guess variations like "password1," accounted for four percent. <\/p>\n
Three percent of the passwords expressed attitudes like "I don’t care," "Whatever," "Yes" or "No." <\/p>\n
There were sentimental choices – "Iloveyou" – and their opposite – "Ihateyou." <\/p>\n
Robert Graham, of the company Errata Security, which did the analysis and published the conclusions, advises that to better protect against cyber intrusions: "choose a password that is longer than eight characters with one capital letter and one symbol." <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Better think twice before choosing a password for emails, online bank accounts and airline tickets. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}