Passwords and online security

In 2015, IT security expert Mark Burnett collected and analyzed 10 millions passwords.

Look at his hit list of top five passwords:

1. Password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. 1234
5. qwerty

But, how frequent are these passwords? What fraction of passwords consist of these naive combination. The answer is pretty alarming.

Burnett found that almost 5% of users had ‘password’ as their password, 8.5% had password or 123456;

10% had the top three: password, 123456 or 12345678;

14% had one of the top 10 passwords;

40% had one of the top 100 password;

79% had one of the top 500 passwords;

And 91% had a password from top 1,000 passwords.

Can you imagine that, out of 6 million collected passwords over 91% of them were from a list of just 1000.

Does that sound very secure?

Animals, sports, personal names, and even expletives are among the most common. The phrase ‘letmein’ was number 11 on the list.

Changing password frequently does not help much, at least not if the password is short or common. Better is to have a long…