Some people are either just too lazy to come up with strong passwords for online accounts, or they are simply uncreative enough to come up with something unique. On the other hand, some people choose easy-to-remember passwords out of fear that it'll be forgotten otherwise.
But in light of the 8-million Yahoo user data breach that took place months ago, researchers from Lancaster University and Peking and Fujian Normal universities in China are strongly encouraging people to come up with stronger passwords.
"Why do [some] use such obvious passwords? A main reason I think is that they're either unaware of or don't understand the risks of online security," Lancaster University's Dr. Jeff Yan told The Daily Mail. "Just like everybody knows what one should do when red lights are on in the road, eventually everybody will know 123456 or the like is not a good password choice."
Yan and other researchers developed an algorithim that enabled them to correctly guess the passwords of more than 73 percent of ordinary users' accounts. They even managed to crack a third of the passwords that were selected by those who were security-savvy within 100 guesses.
They revealed that the 10 most common passwords that were discovered in the Yahoo database hack were: "123456," "password," "welcome," "ninja," "abc123," "123456789," "12345678," "sunshine," "princess," and "qwerty,"
If not for these choices, most users opted for personal information such as names, ages and birthdays — which are quite easy for hackers to access.
Because of this alarming information, the Mirror came up with a couple of suggestions on how to create strong passwords. It is highly recommended that users select phrases as their passwords. But to make it stronger, a phrase such as "knot my pencil" should be turned into "Kn0tmyP3n$il" — which utilises a good mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and symbols.
People who are too afraid of coming up with complicated passwords should be able to visualise their password so they won't have a tough time recalling it.
