The annual password fiasco

Leaked Passwords The annual password fiasco

There are things that change: Every day the sun comes up. And every year it turns out that the most insecure passwords are by far the most popular. The Hasso-Plattner-Institute, presented to the most popular weak passwords.

Of course, many Users have secure passwords. But the analysis of a huge database of leaked access data shows every year, many people still rely on simple words, or simple keyboard patterns. Finally, one can notice the gorgeous easy. But it is also delightfully easy to guess or crack.

An example of this? Number one on the Charts of the most unsafe passwords of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) is for years the undisputed “123456”, this year, followed by “123456789” and the inevitable “password”.

My password in the network?

The with of a current evaluation of 3.1 million access data .de-Mail addresses, with the HPI its Identity Leak Checker feeds, and the 2020 leaked. With the Checker Tool, Users can find out users, whether they have been hacked and your data access to specific services may be free in the network flottieren.

Almost creative take on the places four and six “hallo123” and “I love you”. On the places eleven to twenty cavort with “QWERTY”, “Hello” or “sunshine” in contrast, many old Acquaintances. You could comment on the ninth place “lol123”.

Easy game for hackers

To laugh the attacker, which you have to follow it with words that are in the dictionary, with such keyboards, but otherwise – well – known characters, as well as combinations and, in General, to short passwords easy to crack Accounts but mostly.

The Federal office for information security (BSI) recommends individual and complex passwords that consist of at least eight characters. But as a General rule: Longer is better. The HPI even recommends a minimum of 15 characters.

It is important to use all of the character classes, so upper – and lowercase letters, Numbers, and special characters. No words from the dictionary take. And no same or similar passwords for different services. In addition, it is advisable to enable Two-factor authentication wherever it is available.

Gibberish, it’s supposed to be

Comes out, ideally a cryptic password, speak gibberish without any sense. To memorize such a password, you can use so-called password phrases as an easy-to-remember mnemonic. The Start or stop character of the words in the sentence, but also set, special characters and Numbers in the password.

But password phrases can memorize an unlimited number of. Therefore, a password Manager, such as the Open-Source recommended program Keepass. The managers are small Safe programs, which are mostly also available as Smartphone Apps available. You can store many complex passwords in encrypted form. To the Safe with the collection in it unlock, you have to remember only one master password – for example, on the basis of a pass-word sentence.

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