Wednesday, 9 November 2016

Brits Are Still Not Good AT Using Passwords

password

Brits are still considered to be awful at using passwords.

Remembering all your passwords can often be a challenge.

It seems that as we place more and more of our lives online, creating multiple accounts, many users fall in to the trap of re-using the same passwords, or rehashing obvious choices.

Now new data has shown that British users are still incredibly bad at creating passwords that are tough to crack, leaving many of us to attack from cyber criminals.

The news comes from analysis of the password database leaked in the hack on Yahoo back in 2012.

Researchers speaking to the Daily Mail showed that the most popular password choices are still obvious examples such as "123456", "qwerty" - and of course, "password".

Other top choices included "welcome", "ninja", "abc123" and "princess", with many others made of simple combinations of the user's name, age or birthday.

The data was analysed by a team of researchers from the Lancaster University, headed up by Dr. Jeff Yan.

He told the Daily Mail, "Why do [some] use such obvious passwords? A main reason I think is that they’re either unaware of or don’t understand the risks of online security."

"Just like everybody knows what one should do when red lights are on in the road, eventually everybody will know 123456 or the like is not a good password choice."

The Yahoo hack, which was revealed earlier this year, saw over 200 million user accounts exposed to hackers, who then sold on the details online.

The details included user names, birth dates and email addresses along with passwords, which were not encrypted.

Yahoo also confirmed that it had been hit by a data breach earlier this year which also put details of more than 500 million user accounts at risk.


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