National Password Day began to stress the importance of creating secure passwords. But if you’re like me, you probably forgot it even existed.
National Password Day is a relatively new occasion. It can trace its origins to 2013.
You probably didn’t notice it as it quietly passed by last week. It falls on the first Thursday of May. Don’t feel bad. I missed it as well.
So if you didn’t mark the day by changing a password or two, you’re in good company.
Why should you care about passwords?
I’m not sure who’d actually ask such a question in this day and age. But I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.
Back in December, Forbes posted a story with two surprising pieces of information:
- During the first six months of 2019, more than 4 billion records were exposed by data breaches.
- On December 4, a security researcher discovered a treasure trove of more than a billion plain-text passwords in an unsecured online database.
If those two facts don’t give you pause, you’re not taking account security seriously enough.
Enter National Password Day.
Every year, I do a post about lousy passwords. The last one, about a year ago, found that 123456 was the most common password hacked. But password — yes, that word is used as a password — also ranked high on the list.
In fact, for several years now, I’ve been talking about lousy passwords.
Here, from just four years ago, are the 10 worst passwords security experts revealed:
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty
- 12345678
- 111111
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- password
- 123123
- 987654321
If you’re using any of these, or any of these…stop it.
Stop it right now!
You might have just missed National Password Day. But you have no excuse to keep using combinations like these that could make it easy for someone other than you to access your data.
