The annual list of the worst passwords is out. People are lazy and still use the same old compromised passwords. Not much has changed since 2018, 2017, or 2016. SplashData’s 9th annual list of worst passwords looked at 5 million passwords that were leaked in various data breaches in 2019 and found that 123456 is still the most frequently used password.
Some other interesting password factoids from the survey include:
password has been knocked out of the top two spots for the first time in the list’s history.| Rank | Password | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 123456 | (Rank unchanged from 2018) |
| 2 | 123456789 | (up 1) |
| 3 | qwerty | (Up 6) |
| 4 | password | (Down 2) |
| 5 | 1234567 | (Up 2) |
| 6 | 12345678 | (Down 2) |
| 7 | 12345 | (Down 2) |
| 8 | iloveyou | (Up 2) |
| 9 | 111111 | (Down 3) |
| 10 | 123123 | (Up 7) |
| 11 | abc123 | (Up 4) |
| 12 | qwerty123 | (Up 13) |
| 13 | 1q2w3e4r | (New) |
| 14 | admin | (Down 2) |
| 15 | qwertyuiop | (New) |
| 16 | 654321 | (Up 3) |
| 17 | 555555 | (New) |
| 18 | lovely | (New) |
| 19 | 7777777 | (New) |
| 20 | welcome | (Down 7) |
| 21 | 888888 | (New) |
| 22 | princess | (Down 11) |
| 23 | dragon | (New) |
| 24 | password1 | (Unchanged) |
| 25 | 123qwe | (New) |
Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData, told Gizmodo,
Our hope … is to convince people to take steps to protect themselves online, and we think these and other efforts are finally starting to pay off. We can tell that over the years people have begun moving toward more complex passwords, though they are still not going far enough as hackers can figure out simple alphanumeric patterns.
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So how can you keep your online personal information safe?
Make sure none of your passwords are on SplashData’s worst passwords of the year list. If they are log on and change them immediately. See the full 100 worst passwords on SplashData’s site.Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
It’s A Wonderful Life is a holiday classic today. The film, which stars Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore was released in 1946 by RKO Radio Pictures. Despite legendary director Frank Capra, claims it was his best movie, it was a box-office flop.
Even though the movie was a commercial failure, that did not stop the Feds. The Smithsonian reports that from its release until 1956, It’s A Wonderful Life was deemed a communist plot against the U.S. by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. An FBI agent was assigned to watch the film as part of the FBI’s program to detect and neutralize Commie influences in Hollywood (PDF). The FBI agent reportedly said the film was “very entertaining.”
Even though it was entertaining for the Hollywood G-Man it was not good enough for the Bureau. The FBI focused on It’s a Wonderful Life because it suspected director Frank Capra, lifelong Republican, of left-wing sympathies. The Bureau believed that the 1939 Capra movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was a socialist film.
The Washington Post reports that the FBI believed that two of It’s a Wonderful Life screenwriters were Communists. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, “were very close to known Communists and on one occasion in the recent past … practically lived with known Communists and were observed” eating lunch every day with “known Communists.”
As a result of this report, the film underwent further FBI scrutiny. Professor at Franklin and Marshall College, John A. Noakes told The Smithsonian that the FBI “also identified what they considered a malignant undercurrent in the film.” The FBI scrutiny found, “those responsible for making It’s a Wonderful Life had employed two common tricks used by Communists to inject propaganda into the film.”
In his article “Bankers and common men in Bedford Falls.” Professor Noakes identifies the two common “devices” or tricks, the FBI saw in It’s a Wonderful Life.
1- Values or institutions judged to be particularly American are smeared or presented as evil in a movie.
2- Values or institutions judged to be particularly anti-American or pro-Communist are glorified in a movie.
The FBI believed the Christmas classic was guilty of using Communist trick 1 by discrediting bankers. In a 1947 FBI memo, the Hollywood G-Man said that the poor depiction of the movie’s antagonist banker Henry F. Potter “represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.” The report continued by saying that the depiction was a deliberate ploy to ensure that Potter was the most hated character in the movie.
The FBI report also claimed the movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”
An unnamed Bureau “expert” who knew better than three-time Academy Award winner Frank Capra, said that instead of demonizing Potter, the film should have shown that he was only following the rules issued by State Bank Examiners about making loans.
The FBI also believed the movie was guilty of using Communist trick 2 by defending the common man. Professor Noakes points to the scenes where George Bailey defends loans made by the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan to working men that want a decent home. These scenes challenged the status quo and thus were considered “Communist.” In the post-World War II paranoia, even the idea of a community bank could be read as Communist.
Further, George Bailey’s deep unhappiness in a quintessentially American small-town life was viewed by the FBI as also Communist. The FBI report characterized George Bailey’s depression and existential crisis as a “subtle attempt to magnify the problems of the so-called ‘common man’ in society.”
Because of these factors, the FBI handed over the results of its investigation to the U.S. Congresses’ House Un-American Activities Committee. The HUAC was an investigative subcommittee established to weed out organizations and individuals with suspected communist ties. Best known for its leader, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s. The HUAC had a hearing on It’s A Wonderful Life.
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Of course, we could focus on the deeper issues of It’s a Wonder Life, like the FBI Communist hunters playing fast and loose with the truth or the not surprisingly still relevant commentary on too big to fail banks.
Or
It’s a Wonderful Life is simply a classic holiday movie you watch on Christmas – at least until Die Hard, Scrooged or A Christmas Story come on.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
The Godzilla Christmas Tree! The King of the Monsters is wrapped up in lights and equipped with glowing red eyes and the ability to breathe fog machine smoke while wearing a Santa hat.
The creation was up for sale on the New Zealand-based selling site Trademe – check out the listing at TREEZILLA
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Many people will find a smart TV under their tree this year. Smart TVs are like regular televisions but with an internet connection. The global smart TVs market is expected to reach 249.9M units by 2024. And all those smart TVs may be spying on you. A while ago I wrote about Vizio (VZIO) getting caught invading your privacy by collecting and selling your personal data. Despite the fact that Vizo had to pay a $2.2M fine, smart TV manufacturers continue to spy on their customers.
ZDNet reports that that smart TVs send user data to tech titans including Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), and Netflix. These devices are spying on you even when they are idle. U.S. and UK researchers say smart television sets produced by popular vendors including Samsung (005930), Apple (AAPL), and LG (LGLD), alongside content and app streaming devices such as Amazon (AMZN) FireTV, and Roku, are sending out information potentially without the knowledge or consent of users.
Financial Times
In a paper titled, “Information Exposure From Consumer IoT Devices” (PDF), the team said that 34,586 controlled experiments found that 88% of devices send information to firms other than the device manufacturer; 56% of U.S. devices and 83.8% of UK devices send your info overseas. They also report every device they studied exposed some kind of information in plain-text.
The researchers from Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that 37% could “reliably inferred” user and device behavior from eavesdropping on the user’s interactions with television sets and other household IoT products.
The study found that almost half of the tested devices contacted Amazon. That includes devices not manufactured by Amazon. David Choffnes, one of the authors of the paper warns that Amazon has a lot of information about what you are doing in your home.
According to the paper location data and IP addresses were commonly sent by our IoT devices to third parties in the cloud including Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft (MSFT), Akamai (AKAM), and Google.
When it came to smart TVs, however, almost all of the devices included in the study would contact Netflix — whether or not a TV was configured with an account for the content streaming service. “This, at the very least, exposes information to Netflix about the model of [a] TV at a given location,” the paper reads.
Some of the tech titans collecting your data responded to the researchers.
Internet-connected smart TVs combined with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu seem to be a cord-cutter’s dream. But like anything else that connects to the internet, it opens up smart TVs to security vulnerabilities and hackers. But as is the case with most other internet-connected devices, manufacturers often don’t put security as a priority. Not only that, many smart TVs come with a camera and a microphone that attackers can access.
Because manufacturers don’t put security as a priority, the FBI issued a warning about the risks that smart TVs pose. The FBI warned that hackers can take control of your unsecured smart TV and in worst cases, take control of the camera and microphone to watch and listen in.
… TV manufacturers and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home … your unsecured TV can give him or her an easy way in the backdoor through your router.
TechCrunch notes that some of the biggest attacks targeting smart TVs were developed by the CIA, but were stolen. The files were later published online by WikiLeaks.
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If you are interested in inspecting the IoT network traffic in your smart home, Princeton University has developed and released an open source tool called IoT Inspector. The software uses ARP spoofing to analyze what IoT devices are connected to the Internet, how much data is exchanged, and how often information is traded.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
