Alright, enough "monkey"-ing around.
A couple weeks ago we posted a list of the 25 most common passwords of 2011 (or "worst passwords"), which really hasn’t changed very much over the years. Old habits die hard, which is why "password," “monkey,” “12345,” and “letmein" are perrenial favorites.
But laziness, poor memory, and lack of creativity are no excuses for using a weak password. My colleague Eric Griffith has just published a two-part series on creating strong passwords, and password recovery and control tools to help you manage them:
Password Protection: How to Create Strong Passwords
Password Protection: Password Recovery and Control Tools
There are so many ways to strengthen your password. Spell a word backwards, use l33t speak, throw in random capital letters and special characters.
We can't emphasize enough how important it is to have a strong password; safe password practices are one of the few things standing between you and identity theft, loss of privacy, and even an empty bank account. Having a tough-to-crack password won't thwart a sophisticated cybercriminal, who can use other methods to breach a server in which passwords are stored. But a solid password will at least deter the lowest common denominator like a nosy partner or a low-level hacker using a dictionary attack that simply tries thousands of passwords.
A few months ago a software architect at Microsoft, compiled after the Sony PSN hack, revealed that most of us have three, easy-to-crack passwords.
Hopefully next year when I write the annual list of worst passwords, “monkey” will not be up there.
For more from Sara, follow her on Twitter @sarapyin.