Here’s your scary number for the day: 600,000
That is the number of Facebook accounts that will be compromised just in the next 24 hours.
Do I have your attention? Good!
Passwords – we all have them! And most of us have more than just one. In fact, recent studies give us the following breakdown:
| Number of Passwords Per User | |
| Users | # of Passwords |
| 54% | 1 to 5 |
| 28% | 6 to 10 |
| 7% | 11 to 15 |
| 5% | 16 to 20 |
| 6% | 20+ |
Folks, that’s a lot of passwords!
I think we all agree that passwords are necessary…a necessary evil perhaps…but necessary nonetheless. Our modern passwords are literally the keys to our respective kingdoms. They hold access to everything from our bank accounts to the videos we watch. If it’s online in this day and age – you bet there’s gonna be a password.
Most of us do not realize that the single, most-effective thing we can do to prevent any type of bad guy threat is to use strong passwords!
Bad guys cut right to the chase these days. They go to the account login screen of any site they want access to and just start trying username/password combinations. And, considering The Top 5 Most Common Passwords list below, for bad guys that process is simple…but effective.
Now, why is this so effective? Well, we’re human, and we like things to be simple and easy. The bad guys know this. And that’s our Achilles Heel so-to-speak.
Here’s what I’m talking about: I present to you The Top 5 Most Common Passwords for 2015:
| Top 5 Most Common Passwords (2015) | |
| Rank | Password |
| 1 | 123456 |
| 2 | password |
| 3 | 12345 |
| 4 | 1234 |
| 5 | qwerty |
Pro-Tip: if you have a password that appears in the list above please stop reading this post and go change that password…right…NOW!
It’s easy to have passwords that are simple. Likewise, it’s difficult to remember more than one password, especially if they are complex. So, what do we do? We try to keep our passwords simple and easy to remember and then we use that same password for multiple accounts. This. Is. Bad.
Using simple passwords is like leaving the keys to your car in the door while you go inside the store to shop. You’re just asking for the bad guys to pay you a visit.
Remember the old saying, “An ounce of prevention – A pound of cure!”
By choosing strong passwords, we increase our online security by orders of magnitude. By taking a few, very simple steps, we can make the keys to our kingdoms much safer and much harder for the bad guys to compromise.
Tune in next month when we introduce you to a three point process to make your passwords strong…and secure.
