Over the weekend, the gossip site Gawker was hacked and over one million email addresses and passwords were compromised. It’s certainly not life shattering, unless you happen to be one of the IT people at Gawker responsible for online security. The site is recovering and asking all its members to change their passwords. This incident does highlight how lightly we tend to take our online passwords. The Wall Street Journal analyzed some of the exposed Gawker data to discover the trends in member’s passwords selections. Here are some of the top passwords:
- 123456
- password
- lifehack
- qwerty
- abc123
- letmein
- 0
- trustno1
- passw0rd
- 111111
Chances are, some of you reading this use the same passwords for your online accounts. Well, stop it! All of us could stand to spend another few seconds creating longer and more difficult passwords. No password, no matter how long or how complex is totally safe, but the more complex your password, the harder it is for someone to guess and compromise your data or your life. Want to check your password and see how secure it may or may not be? Point your browser to howsecureismypassword.net and enter any combination into the password box for yourself and find out. It’s actually kind of fun.
