INNOVATION
How hackable is your Password?
people, places, and things in their personal and professional lives e.g., your dog’s name, your spouse’s birthdate, and other words and phrases related to your life that are possibly discoverable on your social media profiles.
Passwords have become an infinite part of our daily lives for some decades now, acting as a critical gatekeeper and guarding our digital identities. Since the beginning of the cyber age, we have fully trusted that our password will protect us online from hackers and scammers, but a lot has happened since those days when users only needed to remember a few passwords.
According to research by one password management company, an average person has about 70-80 passwords. To put this into perspective, 80 words can make up a four-verse poem, or a pop song, not counting the repetition of the chorus. Eighty passwords are a lot to memorise. Unique passwords will offer better security because if one of your online systems is compromised, the access to another service is not possible. The most commonly used passwords have not changed much in the last seven years, proving that most people do not put enough effort into creating a complex password. The 2020 top five list are: 1. 123456 2. 123456789
3. qwerty With the rapid development of ecommerce, social 4. password media and self-service sites, we now have to get accustomed to managing dozens of usernames 5. 111111 and passwords, and sometimes security answers. Having to memorise a password that is eight characters long and ensuring that it contains lowercase or uppercase letters, numbers and special characters, can be a tiresome chore, only to have it expire in 90 days and having to reset all over again. Unless your password was randomly generated, it is probably locked away in your mind somewhere. Brute-force memory retrieval is not usually very effective, so what can you do to try to remember what your password was? Thank goodness for the “Forgotten your password?” option as a backup. Most people create passwords based on www.graduatehouse.com.au
Qwerty comes from the order of the first six keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard. 46
