NordPass Gives Advice on Password Hygiene For the New Year
NordPass has listed 200 most commonly used passwords of 2019. The list contains such easy-to-hack login credentials as “12345” or a romantic “iloveyou.” Despite the constant reminders from cybersecurity experts, people keep on using the same letter or number combination for all their accounts.
The most popular passwords of 2019 contain all easy-to-guess number combinations, such as 12345, 111111, and 123321, or just strings of letters forming a horizontal or vertical line on a QWERTY keyboard: asdfghjkl, qazwsx, 1qaz2wsx, etc. The most obvious one — “password” — remains very popular, as 830,846 people still use it in 2019.
“2019 has seen the most data breaches in history, and those cyber incidents have affected billions of internet users. People struggle creating passwords, and this is one of the main reasons why users stick to the primitive ones. However, passwords should help protect us instead of putting our privacy in danger. It is as important as ever that internet users step up their cybersecurity game,” says Chad Hammond, a security expert at NordPass.
The list of 200 most popular passwords was compiled from the credentials that were leaked in data breaches just this year — independent researchers evaluated the database contains 500 million passwords in total.
Year after year, people continue to use the same passwords that can be seen at the top of the “worst passwords” list. As Chad Hammond notes, such passwords are easy to remember. “Most people prefer to use weak passwords rather than trying to remember long, complex ones. It also usually means they use the same one for all their accounts. And if one of them ends up in a breach, all other accounts get compromised, too.”
People also often think they have nothing to hide. “But no one leaves their house unlocked. Even if there’s nothing valuable inside, nobody would like strangers sniffing around. And just imagine them changing the lock. The same applies to your online life. Nobody wants to lose access to their personal accounts, especially paying thousands in ransom afterward,” Chad Hammond, a security expert at NordPass, explains.
To keep your accounts secure, here are 5 tips on how to maintain good password hygiene:
- Go over all the accounts you have and delete the ones you no longer use. If a small, obscure website ends up breached, you might never even hear about it. You can use haveibeenpawned.com to check if your email was ever in a breach.
- Update all your passwords and use unique, complicated ones to safeguard your accounts. Employ a password generator to make sure they are impossible to guess. To see if any of your current passwords were ever exposed online, head over to our password strength checker.
- Use 2FA if you can. Whether it’s an app, biometric data, or hardware security key, your accounts will be much safer when you add that extra layer of protection.
- Set up a password manager. It is a perfect tool for both generating and storing passwords. With a trustworthy manager like NordPass, you will only need to remember one master password and forget about the rest.
- Make sure to check your every account for suspicious activities regularly. If you notice something unusual, change your password immediately.
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NordPass is a new generation password manager shaped with cutting-edge technology, zero-knowledge encryption, simplicity, and intuitive design in mind. It securely stores and organizes passwords by keeping them in one convenient place. NordPass was created by the cybersecurity experts behind NordVPN — one of the most advanced VPN service providers in the world.
For more information: nordpass.com.