18 Terrible Passwords and How To Fix Them

Happy New Year! We can tell by our volume of Web visitors that real estate agents are working hard. Welcome back! Hope you had a great holiday break. Now is the time for you to get things cleaned up and ready for the new housing market. First and foremost – clean up all of your passwords.

How many username and password combinations have you left scattered all over the Web? Dozens? Hundreds?

We bring this up because SplashData, a password management application provider, unveiled its "25 Worst Passwords of the Year" for 2011, which was also featured by online news aggregator Mashable.

SplashData compiled their list "from files containing millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers" and stated that "Hackers can easily break into many accounts just by repeatedly trying common passwords . . ." So when they say "worst," they basically mean the most common, and therefore the most easily stolen.

Here's the list:

1. letmein
2. trustno1
3. dragon
4. baseball
5. 111111
6. iloveyou
7. master
8. sunshine
9. ashley
10. bailey
11. passw0rd
12. shadow
13. 123123
14. 654321
15. superman
16. qazwsx
17. michael
18. football

Anyway, SplashData also provided some helpful dos and don'ts for creating stronger, more secure passwords:

• Do: make your passwords at least eight characters
• Do: use a variety of letters (capital and lowercase), numbers, or special characters (#, $, *, etc...) when possible.
• Don't: use the same username/password combination on multiple sites. Microsoft agrees.

If you feel like you won't be able to remember lots of different logins, you can either write them down somewhere safe, or use an online password manager to help you keep track.

Hopefully this post is just a friendly refresher course on password security. But, if your password does happen to be "password," go ahead and change it – nobody will know.