Do you have a dumb password?

Okay, you’re probably not stupid enough to use your own name as a password or even your username. But would you use 'test’, ‘Blink182’ or the name of your football team? If you answered yes, then it might be time to rethink it.

Many people choose the same passwords as thousands of others – and use them over and over again (you might reconsider: ‘iloveyou’, ‘biteme’, ‘sexsex’. iceman’, ‘charlie’‘princess’, ‘gandalf’ and ‘startrek' – they’re more ubiquitous than iPods).

Some people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable. For example, look at these passwords from What’s my pass?:

• ncc1701 - the ship number for the Starship Enterprise
• thx1138 - the name of George Lucas’s first movie, a 1971 remake of an earlier student project
• qazwsx (look at your keyboard)
• 666666 (or other repeated single digits or letters)
• ou812 - the title of a 1988 Van Halen album
• 8675309 – a number mentioned in a 1982 song by Tommy Tutone. The song supposedly caused an epidemic of people dialling 867-5309 and asking for Jenny.

Even the way people misspell words is consistent.

In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers use lists of common passwords (like the one that follows). One out of every 50 people uses one of the top 20 worst passwords listed here. If your password is on the list – change it, dufus.

20. fuckme
19. pass
18. abc123
17. monkey
16. shadow
15. football
14. michael
13. master
12. baseball
11. letmein
10. mustang
9. 696969
8. qwerty
7. dragon
6. 12345
5. pussy
4. 1234
3. 12345678
2. password
1. 123456

Imperva, a web security company, found that nearly 1% of the 32 million people it studied were using ‘123456’ as a password (that’s 320,000 stupid people).

So, what makes a good password that’s not impossible to remember?

Security experts suggest taking a sentence and transforming it into a non-existent word. For instance ‘This little piggy went to market’ might become ‘tlpWENT2m’.