25 Worst Passwords of 2012

How many accounts do you have online? Gosh! Has anyone ever asked you that? Probably Not! But if you think about it, the average user would have at least a dozen or more online accounts, all which require a user name and password. Keeping track of them is virtually impossible, and well, who has the time to keep a word or excel sheet of user name and passwords.

What to do? Well, most of us just use the same one over and over again, with small variations when required by the site. In fact, you probably get quite frustrated when the website requires you to add both capital letters, lower case, and numbers and characters. Grrrr!

But let me tell you something, there is a good reason for this. Literally millions of websites are being hacked daily, and their customer info taken. If your user name and password is the same for everything and it falls into the wrong hands, well, say good bye to your online life. I'm not kidding, this happens every day, no matter how badly you want to believe it doesn't.

So I figured it makes sense to write a post about the importance of creating passwords. Let's begin with the worst passwords of 2012! Surprisingly, quite some new ones were added, including "Jesus" (probably not upper-case), "mustang," and "ninja." Splash Data

password (unchanged) 123456 (unchanged) 12345678 (unchanged) abc123 (up 1) qwerty (down 1) monkey (unchanged) letmein (up 1) dragon (up 2) 111111 (up 3) baseball (up 1) iloveyou (up 2) trustno1 (down 3) 1234567 (down 6) sunshine (up 1) master (down 1) 123123 (up 4) welcome (new) shadow (up 1) ashley (down 3) football (up 5) jesus (new) michael (up 2) ninja (new) mustang (new) password1 (new)

Now this is real. According to recent data most people use one of these 25 passwords, with the most common one being "password." But, if I spend the rest of this post saying that you better change them or your life will end, and it'll be a tragedy, and who knows what, well, you'll have me pegged as a nutty. Wouldn't you? But seriously, it's not cool. So what I do? Hmm.. Well, for starters I would never use any of the above passwords, especially not now that I've posted it to all of you:). Instead, I've been working on my own personal strategy for passwords, which basically follows a simple principle:

Pick a song that's meaningful to you. Say for example the happy birthday song. Then use the first letter in each so Happy Birthday to Marc, Happy Birthday to you, =HBTMHBTY Add some numbers like the day you were born =HBTMHBTY +09 Have one verse in capital and one in lowercase. HBTM+hbty =HBTMhbty Add the numbers: HBTMhbty09

It's really quite simple, and works with most songs. We all have something that's catchy in our heads, that most people don't know about. It can also be a quote, or something similar. But then again, you still shouldn't use the exact same one for all accounts, because your password if stolen will give access to all your other online accounts. I'd really like to hear from people who used one of these 25 passwords, and if you have another interesting strategy, well please share it in the comments. I can't wait to hear from people who have cool ideas for passwords, or even more ridiculous passwords than the above.

Cheers Marc