Video games. “Pikachu” or “Salamèche”: stop Pokémon passwords

Your password is probably not secure enough. It’s not me saying it, it’s Specops Software, “the leader in password management and authentication solutions”. Why talk about it in a “gaming” section? Because passwords Pokémonthat’s enough !

To determine which were the most vulnerable French passwords, the company analyzed more than 800 million compromised passwords. And here is what emerges: Internet users use far too many names of anime heroes or Pokémon.

Passwords not strong enough

Here are the most cracked pop culture passwords according to the security firm:

1. Sasha

2. Naruto

3. Sakura

4. Pokemon

5. Pierre

6. Anbu

7. Minecraft

8. Sasuke

9. Evoli

10. Pikachu

Then comes “Let’s go (letsgo)” and at the end of the table, Salamèche, Aligatueur, Dracolosse, or Magikarp (shame!). Besides the fact that Eevee is more popular than Pikachu and that Sacha is ahead of Naruto, what this ranking tells us above all is that many Internet users still use insecure passwords.

But let us be reassured: users too often use city names (the darling of lawyers, Morsang-sur-Orge is found at the bottom of the ranking), sequences of letters such as “azerty”, television series or even real words like “cava”, “thank you” or “password”.

How to choose an effective password?

This article is above all an opportunity to recall a few rules concerning the use of passwords. To be considered secure, a password must be at least 12 characters long. Even better: you can add numbers, upper and lower case letters and punctuation marks or special characters like €, #….

Another rule: choose an “anonymous” password. No date of birth, the name of a pet or even that of a Pokémon. All this is too quickly identifiable.

We can also think of double authentication: an email or an SMS is sent to the owner of the account in the event of connection from a new place. There are also authentication applications that allow you to add security for the most sensitive accesses.

Last golden rule concerning passwords: do not forget, quite simply, to change them regularly.

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