Merlin Software’s Mike Pnematicatos chief architect talks about the worrying and continual use of weak passwords to access sites containing personal data and gives some top tips on how to set a strong password to prevent your own life being hacked.
It’s 2015 and for years now many of us have been logging onto the World Wide Web (the Interweb as technophobe James May from Top Gear calls it). So it would be fair to expect that we would have a good understanding of the importance of a strong password by now.
After all, a good password will stop you being hacked or your identity being stolen.
But clearly this is not the case if we look at the annual list of the worst passwords issued earlier this year by SplashData.
SplashData compiled the 3.3 million stolen passwords made public throughout the year and assembled them in order of popularity – and 2014 was, well, a little worrying.
Here’s the list of SplashData’s worst passwords of 2014 (and their position in relation to 2013):