If you’ve made a common mistake of using a password that is easy for you to remember, such as “password” for your password, then you may want to rethink that strategy. Passwords that are easy to guess pose a serious risk to your personal identity.
Unsecured computers are most frequently victims of hacker attacks. Statistics puts hacking attempts at one every 39 seconds – that’s over 2,000 attempts every single day. So it’s a reality you need and should be aware of.
These hackers will usually try out a string of the most common usernames and passwords when attempting to penetrate a computer system. If you frequently use your username as your password, you should know that over 43% of all successful hacking attempts are on systems where the end user has used the same username and password.
Top 10 Passwords not to use
- 123456
- 12345
- 123456789
- Password
- iloveyou
- princess
- rockyou
- 1234567
- 12345678
- abc123
In both film and TV shows, hackers are always portrayed as individuals that have grudges against institutions, who make headstrong attempts at breaking into network systems. But the reality, when it comes to hackers, most of these attacks are deployed by automated scripts, that go on a rampage, seeking out thousands of different computer systems at once, looking for security loopholes to exploit.
Statistics prove that these attacks are happening, literally, all the time on computers that have a connection to the internet.
A team set up four Linux computers and hooked them all up to the internet, then recorded every time one of these machines was attacked by a hacker. From this study, it was found that most of the attacks were pretty unsophisticated, coming from hackers that used basic dictionary scripts; which is basically a piece of software designed to run a list of the most commonly used username and passwords in an attempt to hack into a computer.
No comments