There are few more frustrating online experiences than having your e-mail, business or social media account hijacked because of a weak password.
Last month, as many as 150 million people were dragged through just such a violation after a major cyber attack on software company Adobe.
In a statement, the company said that the widespread popularity of its products, including the Flash browser plug-in and the Acrobat software used to create PDF documents, had meant that accounts from all over the world had been compromised.
The attack saw a 10GB database of e-mail addresses leaked from the company, all of which included password information.
An analysis by cyber security researcher Jeremi Gosney this week revealed that “123456” was the most popular password among the millions of Adobe users. Some 1.9 million people used the sequence.
Computer security researchers specialised in password-creating habits, have since begun analysing the word list to gain a better knowledge of password trends.
The Sunday Times of Malta spoke to a number of cyber security experts on the best and worst of lockdown codes.
“When I saw the list of passwords I was shocked. Some of them were ridiculous,” information security analyst James Grech said.
Sliding fingers along the keypad was one of the trends highlighted by Mr Grech, who noticed a similar trend of local passwords in a study of local trends carried out back in 2005.
“‘Asdfg was quite common , so was ‘qwert’ and ‘zxcv’. This is what happens when people slide their fingers along the left side of the keyboard. Some went diagonal, which makes little difference,” he said.
Mr Gosney’s study found that 345,000 used the word “password” with just as many using their first names.
Internet security consultant Brian Borg said while profanity might be the message intended for hackers, he was still surprised that some 20,000 Adobe users had opted for ‘f*** y**’ as their password of choice.
“People will come up with lots of funny passwords and that’s fine, but it’s important to try to protect your information by using numbers, symbols and a mix of lower and upper case letters,” Mr Borg said.
Funny passwords were not the only booty for the cyber pirates. Mr Borg explained that encrypted debit and credit card numbers along with names and addresses of account holders were also stolen.
Mr Borg said that other popular password don’ts included the name of the software or service being used.
More than 83,000 people used ‘photoshop’ or ‘adobe’.