The Worst Passwords From The Ashley Madison Hack – ‘Football’, Anyone?

It’s annoying when it seems like you are asked to change your password everyday, or encrypt it, or use multiples combinations of letters, numbers and symbols, but there’s a reason that is necessary. You don’t want to be a Josh Duggar if you’re into deceitful behavior, as the Inquisitr has reported on his multiple scandals, and you don’t want someone in Taiwan to discover your VISA number.

Hackers swiped an estimated 36 million accounts associated with Ashley Madison, a site which helps married people cheat on their partners, and there was a frenzied attempt to find out what had been stolen. A momth after the hack, little by little was released by what was known. And what we do know – strong passwords matter. The tens of millions of passwords, though leaked, were hashed, meaning they were cryptographically scrambled, combining letters, numbers, and symbols, making them “very safe” in the land of the internet. But some people didn’t quite heed the advice – a whole lot of people, actually. According to ZDNet, the weaker passwords were what you would expect – just terrible. In fact, one of the top passwords was the numbers “123456,” followed by “password” then “12345,” “qwerty,” “12345678,” “ashley,” “baseball,” “69696969” (really?), “football,” and “f*ckyou.” Insightful passwords. Of course, we all want easy passwords to remember, and that’s understandable, but perhaps now we realize the huge cost of not having to look up a password in our iPhone. Nobody has said what Josh Duggar’s password was, but it would be very interesting to find out.

If your password to ANY account remotely matches any of the above, please be aware that hackers deftly are aware of this. Other common passwords are curse words – “A**hole,” “f*ckme,” and other unsavory mental pictures. Hackers know the common passwords, the shortcuts that are taken. It’s also unwise to use your name, your child’s name, or even your pet’s name. These are commonly used passwords that people only relatively close to you could figure out with little effort.

No, not everyone is hiding an Ashley Madison account (although a lot more than we realized), but nearly everyone is thinking their confidential email, bank account, work records, and health records are safe. Hack after hack has proven this untrue. Security expert Dean Pierce, according to arstechnica, states that a technological advance called bcrypt can stop hacks, or greatly slow them, but many companies haven’t been sold on it.

“With a dump this size, passwords will still pop out like crazy, because people always use weak passwords. Even with good hashing+salt, a poor (or non existent) password policy can put users at risk.”

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