The most-used passwords are still terrible choices

There’s no excuse for having a ridiculously weak account password, and yet many folks continue to make no effort at all on the security front in this respect, according to a new piece of research.

BT.com highlighted a government survey, which was part of the Cyber Streetwise campaign, and found that three quarters of UK citizens used passwords which weren’t secure.

Those could be easy to guess passwords such as the person’s place of birth, and other information which could be readily available on a social media account, or other sources.

As for the most common passwords used last year, that was the usual list of awful choices, topped by "123456" and the brilliant "password", followed closely by the ever secure "12345". "12345678" was in fourth place (at least eight characters, we suppose), followed by a switch to letters with "qwerty".

Yes it’s the sort of stuff that makes you weep, if you’re a security expert at any rate. And yes, these passwords are likely employed for accounts people sign up for and use once, or they consider completely disposable or unimportant, but when you sign up for anything online, you should always make sure the password is at least half decent. And not just "password"...

You might think that maybe all the recent high-profile hacks that we’ve seen could change these most-used terrible passwords, but the reality is, they won’t -- and the top 10 will likely always be much the same until we finally switch away from traditional passwords, and move to more secure systems (such as biometrics).

Or you could always use a password management program, of course -- though that can come with risks of its own in terms of hacking, as we’ve seen in recent times.

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