Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

Clark Howard had an interesting post about the 10 Most Common Passwords. The results gave me the heebie-jeebies! I cannot believe that people have such lame passwords! I am a password FIEND. I am always preaching the need for stronger and better passwords. Here are the top ten most common passwords. Please tell me yours is not among them:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace 1
8. password 1
9. blink182
10. (your first name)

I know that creating, keeping, and typing passwords all day is such a chore. I work on the computer, so it is an ALL DAY drudgery for me. There are a few password-management programs that help make password-making and storing a little easier:

LastPass
KeePass
KeePass Portable (you can install the program on a flash drive and take it with you)
RoboForm
There’s a review here of the Top Ten Password Management programs (all of them cost money)

I wish banks and online credit-card companies had better encryption, though. Oftentimes, they only allow 6-10 characters with only upper- and lower-case letter and numbers. This is very unacceptable– a simple password-cracking program can crack these passwords very easily. My account at Photobucket has a better password than my credit-card account. :-p That really stinks.

Passwords should be very lengthy, up to 20 characters, and preferably should have lots of hexidecimal symbols like @ $ & ^ and so on. You can check the strength of your password with Microsoft’s Password Checker.