What’s the password to your email?

Trick question, don’t answer that.

You know better than to give your user name and password.  You want to make sure your personal and business information is secure and well protected, but just because you don’t hand out your password to just anyone doesn’t mean you’re as secure as you may think.

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard it: Make strong passwords.  Ever since you signed up for that first email account you’ve been told: Make strong passwords.  You may have even started out with passwords no one could guess at – a nonsensical mishmash of over a dozen upper and lower case letters, numbers, exclamation points and every other special character you could squeeze in.

Then came the day you forgot your indecipherable password.  So you changed it to something you could recall more easily, maybe the city you were born in and the last few digits of an old phone number, maybe a childhood pet and your ‘lucky’ number, some variant for each of your different accounts. This may have worked for a while, but as you signed up for new accounts and services you began duplicating your passwords, until eventually you end up with one, easy to remember (and maybe even easy to guess) password for every log-in that you used.

With the recent leak of user information from hacking groups, such as LulzSec, on companies like Sony Pictures there’s plenty of data on user log-in to be analyzed. Microsoft MVP Troy Hunt took a look at the leaked information and discovered that most users’ passwords were, in fact, abysmal.

The test showed that out of the 37,608 accounts Troy analyzed 93 percent of all passwords weighed in at only 6 to 10 characters.  Given that most services impose a 6 to 8 character minimum; this shows that most users were content with passwords that just met the requirements.

The next phase in testing showed that a minuscule number of users apply character variation to their passwords.  The study showed that by looking at a mix of four character types: uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters, only 4 percent of users used three or more character types, and over 50 percent only used one character type.  Less than 1 percent used a non-alphanumeric character in their password.

Favorite Office Automation presents a list of the 25 most common passwords found by the study. You’ll find classic examples of poor passwords, including “123456”, “abc123” and the timeless classic: “password”.

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The lesson in all of this goes back to the beginning of this article, back all the way to the first time you created a user log-in: Make strong passwords.  Not only should you make your password as strong as possible, but remember to change your password often and don’t use the same password across multiple log-ins.

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