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The 5th of May is internationally known as World Password Day. The “celebration” has been around since 2013, devised by Information Security researcher Mark Burnett and later adopted by Intel as a reminder to users to beef up security with their data.
Weak passwords remain a huge Achilles heel for users around the world. The list of the 200 most used in 2021, released recently, reinforces this problem. The classic “123456” continues to lead the ranking, not only in Brazil, but in 41 other countries. 84.5% of the passwords in the ranking, in the Brazilian context, would be broken by a hacker.
“This is especially a problem when a considerable part of them does not require any hacking knowledge to be guessed. They are obvious keyboard sequences or very easy words”, says Leonardo Camata, Information Security specialist at ISH Tecnologia.
“The logic is pretty straightforward. If you haven’t put any effort into coming up with a good password, chances are good that hackers won’t need much to crack it either.”
Check out the ten most common passwords in Brazil below (and keep an eye out if you don’t use any of them):
1° – 123456
2° – 123456789
3rd – Brazil
4° – 12345
5° – 102030
6th – password
7° – 12345678
8° – 1234
9° – 10203
10° – 123123
“The worrying trend seen is that people in general tend to be lazy when it comes to creating a password”, says Camata.
In addition to those shown above, nouns related to food and animals are frequent and should be avoided.” It is also interesting to note how many passwords are related to major events that take place in the year. In 2021, a considerable part of the credentials had some connection with the Olympics in Tokyo”, comments Camata.
How to create a strong password?
Camata lists some tips for creating a strong credential:
Avoid the generic — This is perhaps the most important tip. Any character order that makes sense to anyone in the world (such as an obvious string of keyboard letters, a famous personality, or a team) is at much greater risk of being leaked.
Avoid personal information – This goes for first name, family name or date of birth. Camata also indicates avoiding any personal information that can be easily found on the web (such as the team you support, the name of a pet).
Length matters — The longer your password, the harder it is to crack. Ideally, use one with at least 12 characters.
One-time passwords — After coming up with a difficult and seemingly random password, a mistake many still make is to reuse it elsewhere. The ideal is to have one credential per service used. A password manager is of great help here.
Mix symbols — Another good idea is to intersperse different types of characters, such as uppercase and lowercase, numbers, and other keyboard symbols.
Curiosities
The analysis of the 200 most used credentials also reveals some interesting facts:
– The English team Liverpool was the most used for passwords between football teams in the world. In Brazil, the “champion” was Flamengo.
– In the music world, after not appearing on the 2020 list, the band One Direction was the most frequent in 2021.
– In animals, surprisingly, the species most used in passwords was the dolphin.
– Ferrari and Porsche lead the “ranking” in car brands.
– “Gabriel” was the most common name in Brazil, being the 15th most used password in the entire country.
– An alarmingly high number of people use profanity as a password.
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