Make a New Year’s Password Resolution in 2019

It’s a new year, and time for some resolutions. If you’re struggling with what changes to make, I think this is a good time to suggest using a strong passwords and a password manager. I blog about this every new year, and people continue to use weak and just plain bad passwords. With more and more news reports about hacks, bad security and new breaches every day, you need to protect yourself.

Every year, SplashData puts out a list of the top 100 worst passwords. Let’s have a quick look at the top 10 worst passwords used last year:

  1. 123456
  2. password
  3. 123456789
  4. 12345678
  5. 12345
  6. 111111
  7. 1234567
  8. sunshine
  9. qwerty
  10. iloveyou

Those are really bad. According to SplashData, the over five million leaked passwords evaluated for the 2018 list were mostly held by users in North America and Western Europe. Passwords leaked from hacks of adult websites were not included in this report.

So what can you do?

Use Stronger Passwords

The best passwords use a combination of letters (both cases), numbers and special characters. I’d recommend using a tool to generate strong passwords. I use RandomKeyGen.com to generate passwords for sites as I use and as well as when I create user accounts. That site will generate all sorts of passwords and keys for you, ranging from shorter passwords that are strong and memorable all the way to crazy “fort knox” passwords, like this:

EI4NH|a!j'E?%gg-

That is a nice, strong password. Yes, it’s long, and hard to remember, but do you want an easy password that’s trivial for some bot network to crack? No, didn’t think so. Wolfram Alpha says that if you had a computer making 100,000 guesses a second, it would guess your password in 1.178×10^19 years. That’s a long time. Like age of the universe long.

Use a Password Manager

1Password
Screenshot of 1Password

I find the challenge is remembering long, complicated passwords. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast. To make life easier, I use an app, 1Password, that syncs my passwords across multiple machines and my phone.

If you asked me for my banking or Facebook password, I couldn’t tell you what it is. They’re both 30 character strings of numbers, upper and lower case letters, and special characters. 1Password will also generate passwords if you need. LastPass and KeePass are also apps in this space.

Some of these tools are free or very inexpensive. I think it’s worth it to keep your info just a little more secure than using a password like 123456.

1 thought on “Make a New Year’s Password Resolution in 2019”

Comments are closed.