How pro is your password?

Want to guess someone’s password? Start with ‘password’.

You may well laugh at this statement, thinking ‘what kind of moron would have password as their password’, but ‘password’ STILL tops the charts for the most popular password online.

Despite years and years of security experts urging people to choose a secure password, the top three most used passwords are still ‘password’, ‘123456’ and ‘12345678’.

According to the Daily Mail, the 25 worst passwords of 2012 are as follows:

1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. abc123
5. qwerty
6. monkey
7. letmein
8. dragon
9. 111111
10. baseball
11. iloveyou
12. trustno1
13. 1234567
14. sunshine
15. master
16. 123123
17. welcome
18. shadow
19. ashley
20. football
21. jesus
22. michael
23. ninja
24. mustang
25. password1

So how can we make our passwords stronger, and less vulnerable to fraudsters?

– An ideal password has a mixture of punctuation, letters and numbers
– Where possible, use more than 8 characters
– Use different passwords for everything – criminals steal passwords from less secure websites and use them on more secure platforms such as banking sites
– Use the whole keyboard and not just the most popular characters