Poor, weak passwords have the following characteristics: The password contains fewer than eight characters. The password is a word found in a dictionary (English or foreign). Names of family, pets, friends, coworkers, fantasy characters, etc.
Weak/default passwords
Examples include 123456 and qwerty. Most computer systems will provide a default password when first set up. If these are not changed, this puts computers at risk.
Weak passwords are usually short and easy to crack. Those who use weak passwords are at a higher risk of having their accounts hacked. They are also less likely to be able to use the strongest security features available on the internet. The best way to avoid using a weak password is to create a strong password.
A strong password is: At least 12 characters long but 14 or more is better. A combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Not a word that can be found in a dictionary or the name of a person, character, product, or organization.
Password: m#P52s@ap$V
This is a great example of a strong password. It's strong, long, and difficult for someone else to guess. It uses more than 10 characters with letters (both uppercase and lowercase), numbers, and symbols, and includes no obvious personal information or common words.
A password hint is used to help you remember your password. For example, if my password is my dog's name and I love him a lot, the hint could be "My favorite animal in the world".
Weak passwords always play a major role in any hack. For the ease of user, sometime applications do not enforce password complexity and as a result of that users use simple passwords such as password, password123, Password@123, 12345, god, own mobile number etc.
Equally concerning were Google's findings that almost a quarter (24 percent) of Americans have used some variation of the following weak passwords: abc123, Password, 123456, Iloveyou, 111111, Qwerty, Admin, and Welcome. Clearly these are all very simple for anyone to guess and so provide very little protection.
Password uses repeated or sequential characters
The string “123456789”, for example, is the second most popular password and, despite containing nine digits, it would be cracked in a few seconds. The same applies to combinations like “AAAAAA” or “abcdefgh”, as well as obvious words like “password” or “password123”.
The most common attack methods include brute forcing, dictionary attacks, password spraying, and credential stuffing. Brute forcing is the attempt to guess a password by iterating through all possible combinations of the set of allowable characters.
Use multiple character types.
There's a reason more and more organizations are requiring passwords made with both uppercase and lowercase letters as well as symbols and numbers. When you include all character types, you maximize the amount of possibilities per character, which makes your password harder to crack.
A reminder of how a password was derived. In order to jog the user's memory, some login systems allow a hint to be entered, which is displayed each time the password is requested. For example, if the password contains the date of someone's birthday, one might enter the name of the person as the hint.
A leaked password list is a compilation of compromised passwords gathered from different breached databases. The most famous one these days is RockYou2021. According to Cybernews, it is considered the largest data breach compilation of all time and was leaked on a popular hacker forum.
What does 'Simple password' mean? Simple passwords only have lower case letters and numbers.
Strong passwords are a good defense against persistent cyber attackers but weak passwords can be the entryway to confidential data and operating systems. While there are so many types of passwords that are easy for hackers to guess, here are four quick examples of ones to avoid and tips for picking a strong password.