As you may have heard, there was recently a serious breach of security over at Sony. While the corporation apparently wanted to keep this quiet, the LulzSec hacker group decided to announce that they had stolen more than a million usernames and passwords from Sony. They also said that Sony had, astonishingly, kept the confidential user information in unencrypted, unsecure plain text.
To prove their point, the LulzSec group released a sample of 40,000 of the usernames and passwords on BitTorrent. Security researcher Troy Hunt took that data and did some analyzing that showed how poorly most people are at choosing unique passwords. (Check out Hunt’s site for some helpful security tips.)
The most-frequently used passwords include: password, 123456, purple, princess, maggie, peanut, shadow, ginger, michael, buster, sunshine, tigger, cookie, george, summer, taylor, bosco, abc123, ashley, and bailey.
How does this relate to television? Well, Hunt found that the most frequently used password on the list was “seinfeld.” Apparently there are a lot of computer users are fans of the old NBC sitcom.
If that’s yours, perhaps you might consider a show title that’s a little less popular. Perhaps CopRock, Cavemen, or SuperTrain?
What do you think? What TV show would you use for a password?
I think it’s sort of funny, as Jerry had a MAC, which is, from what I understand, much harder to hack than a PC, but, oh well–if you set 12345 as your password, I would guess that things might go bad down the line….
That’s terrible, I always come up alphanumeric passwords that have nothing to do with my real life and therefore cannot be guessed… but if my Sony information was leaked… -_-