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Liverpool and One Direction fans are easy to hack

by on05 February 2020


Passwords are a little obvious

British pop band One Direction, Liverpool and Chelsea football clubs are the easiest people to hack, according to a NordPass report.

Apparently more than 30,388 people use 'onedirection' as their password. NordPass also found out that Liverpool (41,272) and Chelsea (40,499) football clubs have the best supporters. When it comes to superheroes, Batman (37,973) and Superman (56,113) are winning, and the most patriotic people live in Pakistan (41,798).

Security experts advise steering away from any personal preferences when creating a password. Getting personal makes it easier to guess, if they know anything about their targets.

Nevertheless, according to the research done by NordPass, it's clear that people keep making the same mistakes. This research included 200 most common passwords that were leaked in data breaches in 2019. After reviewing this list, we can draw 10 main categories of the most popular passwords:

1. Easy-to-guess number combinations (for example 12345, 111111, and 123321)

2. Strings of letters forming a horizontal or vertical line on the QWERTY keyboard (asdfghjkl, qazwsx, 1qaz2wsx)

3. The least imaginative one: 'password' and all combinations of it (Password1, password1)

4. Popular female names (Nicole, Jessica, Hannah)

5. Positive, happy words (iloveyou, princess, sunshine, family)

6. Favourite sports or sports team (soccer, Liverpool)

7. Favourite music group (onedirection)

8. Name of the service or device you're using (Facebook, Samsung)

9. Swear words (let your imagination run wild for this one!)

10. Admin-type passwords (computer, test1, welcome)

Chad Hammond, a security expert at NordPass said often, people don't put too much thought into creating strong passwords.

"They think it's hard to guess a password or that a common person is not attractive to hackers. Reality is different. Everyone has accounts and information that are of some value to attackers. 'Password guessing,' or brute-force, attack is an automated, common, and effective method to hack people's passwords,” says

Normally hackers will check if your password is among the most popular ones. Then they will list all known information that you might use for your passwords, such as your name, address, favourite band, sports team, or your pet's name.

There is also a program that will tweak this information by adding more data — numbers or special symbols. Hackers will also translate words into Leetspeak (where 'password' becomes 'p422W0Rd') or scan 'rainbow tables.' These are huge sets of tables filled with hash values pre-matched to possible plaintext passwords. Also, hackers will check if your other accounts have been breached and if you reused the same password for another account.

So if your password is very common or at least falls under one of the 10 most common categories, it will take minutes, or even seconds, to guess it.

 

Last modified on 06 February 2020
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