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Weak Passwords, Online Robbers and How to Secure your Password

Education, General

Let suppose you just got online and opened your mailbox or Facebook ID, as soon as you clicked “Login” after entering your ID and password, you receives an error message saying “Incorrect Password”, you try it again and again but all in vain.

If you are receiving such error then may be caps lock is turned on or may be you are typing the wrong password. If no, then there are 99% chances that your account is hacked.
How the hackers hack the accounts? What harm you can face after your account is hacked? Let us have a look over it.

Symantec often perform surveys to know the users’ behavior against online security and passwords. Here we are going to show you the results of a survey about passwords.

The Survey says:

Among all internet users, 79% of them choose a very easy password for their accounts such as their personal information and birthdays that are known to many people.
Some of the most common passwords are:

Image credit: flickr simpleillustrations

prince
12345
123456
abc123
qwerty
iloveyou
Country name
City name
monkey
princess
daniel
654321

16% user choose their first name as their passwords.

According to the survey, most of the passwords are just consists of 6 or 7 letters that are often a dictionary word. These types of passwords are very easy to hack for password hacking software.

                                             Some great online robberies:

Jonathan James was the first to be sent to prison for hacking. He hacked two great organization’s networks, one of them was a Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The most dangerous action of him was to crack into NASA’s network where he stolen a software worth 1.7 million USD and even he had the control over temperature and humidity within the living space.

Adrian Lamo is second in the list having credit of breaking into New York Times and Microsoft’s computers. He used coffee shops’ and libraries’ internet connections. He also cracked Yahoo!, Bank of America and Citigroup where he found some flaws in their security.

Kevin Mitnick, also known as the most wanted cyber criminal of the US history. He broke into Los Angeles bus punch card system and got a lot of free rides. He also cracked many organization’s computers to steal free software.

                                              How to avoid risky password:

Image creadit: Flickr RobW_

• The password should have more then 8 characters.

• Try to check your password with online free password checkers whether they are hard enough to hack or not.

• Try to use different varieties of characters in your password i-e UPPER CASE LETTERS, lower case letters, numeric(0123456789) and special characters(*&^%!@#$).

• It is also a good practice to replace “o” with “0″(Zero), “E” with “3″ and any other possible combinations.

• Never ever keep a password having dictionary words in it, because it can easily be hacked by cyber criminals as they use some sophisticated tools to try all possible dictionary word.

• Your personal information MUST not be used in your password e-g your name, license, credit card number etc.

Was this post helpful for you. Do you have any other suggestion to keep the password secure. We’ll be waiting for your feedback in comments.