Is it time to change your passwords?

Is it time to change your passwords?

Every year Nordpass releases a list of passwords leaked during the year, and the list from 2020 shows that many of us are not very inventive when it comes to creating passwords. This is a challenge in relation to your IT security.

It only takes seconds to hack weak passwords

Among the worst passwords are “123456”, “123456789” and “password”, which are still among the most used. However, it is very easy for hackers to crack a password that is so simple, and in less than a second they can hack passwords like “123456” or “iloveyou”.

New passwords have also been added since 2019, 5 new ones in the top 20: “picture1”, “senha”, “Million2”, “aaron431” and “qqww1122”. Passwords like these will take hackers between 10 seconds and 3 hours to crack.

If you want to avoid putting your accounts at risk of theft, you need to prioritize security over convenience by creating strong passwords.

Protect your personal data

It is important to protect personal data in our accounts, and it takes so little to create a strong password, which will make it difficult for hackers to find sensitive information about you or your company.

The most used passwords are within the categories of names, numbers, sports, entertainment, swear words and food. The worst thing you can do is to use something related to you such as your pet’s name. It is too easy to hack and it can have major consequences if you use it for several different services, including your online banking and other sites that store sensitive data.

If you can recognize these types of passwords from yourself, it is time to change them. We will give you 5 tips on how to create strong and inventive passwords that will be easy for you to remember.

5 tips on how to create strong passwords that are hard for hackers to crack:

  1. Always use several passwords. Preferably, you should switch between 5-6 passwords
  2. Make sure to change your password regularly, approximately every 3 or 4 months
  3. Use both uppercase and lowercase letters combined with numbers and special characters
  4. Avoid creating passwords with personal information such as birthdays, names, or numbers
  5. Make a sentence that only you can remember, e.g. “Thedoghad4puppies” or compose a sentence that only makes sense to you e.g. “Grandad built red house in 1992” and then take the first two letters of each word to make the password. In this case it would be “Grburehoin19”.

The list of the most used passwords from 2020 shows how many times a password has been exposed, used and how long it would take to crack them. You can find the full list at Nordpass’s website, but here are the 20 worst passwords from last year.

1. 123456

2. 123456789

3. picture1

4. password

5. 12345678

6. 111111

7. 123123

8. 12345

9. 1234567890

10. senha

11. 1234567

12. qwerty

13. abc123

14. Million2

15. 000000

16. 1234

17. Iloveyou

18. aaron431

19. password1

20. qqww1122