A weak password is a character combination that is easy for friends, bad actors or password-hacking software to guess. While your passwords may follow credential strength best practices, other factors, such as reuse, can still make them vulnerable.
Weak passwords are those that are easily guessed by unauthorized users. Examples include “1234”, “password”, “temp”, etc. A weak password poses security risks at two levels—it may enable unauthorized access to confidential information, and may potentially enable an unauthorized user to compromise the system.
Passwords are marked reused if the same password is seen used for more than one saved password across different domains. Passwords are marked weak if they may be easily guessed by an attacker.
Create easy-to-remember but secure passwords
Omit some letters, and transform others into numbers or punctuation marks that resemble the original character. You might want to insert additional punctuation and numbers too. For example, the phrase “You will be welcomed” could be turned into “UW1llBvv3lc0meD;”.
If one of your passwords is compromised, and you've reused it across multiple accounts, a cybercriminal can use that same password to get into all of those accounts.
Password reuse is a person's tendency to use the same password across different online services. People reuse passwords in response to the poor usability of passwords.
Your device may also inform you of passwords that may have been compromised in a data leak. This feature uses strong cryptographic techniques to regularly check derivations of your passwords against a list of leaked passwords in a secure and private way that doesn't reveal to Apple your accounts or passwords.
Cybersecurity experts recommend changing your password every three months. There may even be situations where you should change your password immediately, especially if a cybercriminal has access to your account.
A strong password shouldn't include any personal information, like names of family members or pets, addresses, phone numbers, song lyrics, or birthdays. You should also avoid easily guessed passwords like “password” or “1234”. And to make a password really hard to guess, you shouldn't use a password at all!
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”.
Whatever your reason for doing it, reusing passwords is a practice best left behind. If accounts are compromised, cybercriminals can do a great deal of damage, such as committing identity theft, or stealing money and sensitive information from your place of work.
Password reuse is discouraged because: When a site is compromised by an attacker, the attacker can easily take the user's password that has been reused on other sites and gain access to those other sites.
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.
A strong password is a unique word or phrase a hacker cannot easily guess or crack. Here are the main traits of a reliable, secure password: At least 12 characters long (the longer, the better). Has a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and special symbols.
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.
What Makes a Password Strong? The key aspects of a strong password are length (the longer the better); a mix of letters (upper and lower case), numbers, and symbols, no ties to your personal information, and no dictionary words.
Changing your passwords may not mitigate all the damage from malware or a successful phishing expedition. Still, it can keep future attackers or scammers from accessing your accounts or impersonating you further.
13% of Americans use the same password for every account (Google, Harris Poll) A Google poll found that 1 in 8 US adults used the same password for every single one of their online accounts. An additional 52% reused the same password for some of their accounts, while 35% used unique passwords for every account.
No, you should not use the same password for everything. Security experts recommend using strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts to protect against common cyberattacks.
If Apple detects evidence of a state-sponsored attack, the targeted user will get a Threat Notification on the top of the page when signed into appleid.apple.com. Apple will also send an email and iMessage notification to the account associated with the user's Apple ID. Don't expect this to work perfectly.
Learn about compromised passwords
Compromised passwords and username combinations are unsafe because they've been published online. We recommend that you change any compromised passwords as soon as you can.
Sign in to the Apple ID website (https://appleid.apple.com) and review all the personal and security information in your account to see if there is any information that someone else has added. If you have two-factor authentication turned on, review trusted devices for any devices that you don't recognize.