Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Top 10 passwords

Everyone is going to be blogging this in the next few days, so I might as well share it.

This is the list of Top 10 passwords according to PC Magazine:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. link182
10. (your first name)

password? myspace1? link182? Some people do deserve to have their data stolen.

3 comments:

Ben Bildstein said...

How common does a password have to be to be more common than, say, one of my passwords like '9A3hutEh'? The answer is, it doesn't have to be very common at all.

To put it another way, what password would you expect to me more common than 'password'?

I'm not sure if this makes sense, but reading this makes me think of vanilla ice-cream. You get these stores that do these wonderful flavours like pistachio or ruby red grapefruit, and they also do vanilla. So I think to myself "who's going to order vanilla when you can order one of the other great flavours?" But that's the wrong way of looking at it. Very few people order vanilla, but the point is that enough do to make it worth offering it.

Ben Bildstein said...

The discussion attached to the pcmag.com post seems to conclude that no one can confirm or source this list, but this page on Wired, December last year, has a full story, which may be talking about the same thing, and would explain why myspace1 is on the list.

In short: the list was made from data collected by a phishing attack on MySpace, which ended up falling into the "right hands", so to speak.

Andres Guadamuz said...

Thanks Ben!

I was thinking about the sources as well.