The University of Michigan Basketball Wolverines, the Hockey team, and the Debate team all have made it into the NCAA Final Four. Along the way, the Wolverines busted a few brackets. In keeping with the March bracket madness, Keeper Security ran an analysis they’ve called “Password Madness”. In Password Madness, they developed their own bracketology of bad passwords. During Password Madness, the publisher of password manager software ran an analysis on 1.4 billion clear-text passwords 4iQ found on the dark web for sports team mascots used as passwords.
Followers of Bach Seat already know that passwords suck and there is a long list of passwords like “password” and “123456” that should be banned from use. According to a statement from Keeper Security, of all the passwords looked at, those containing “Tiger” and its variations (such as “T1ger”, “T1g3r”, etc.) appeared 187 percent more often than passwords containing variations of “Eagle,” the second-most common password set found, and nearly 850 percent more than the least common password, which was “Bluejay” and its variations.
The not so élite eight passwords on their list are:
Cowboy- Eagle
- Hurricane
- Irish
- Pirate
- Spartan
- Tiger
- Trojan
This is bad, as I have pointed out, many people re-use the same password on nearly every online account. This behavior opens up hundreds of thousands of credentials to speedy hacking. Keeper Security recommends rather than using their favorite sports team as a password hoops fans, instead concentrate on using unique, high-strength, passwords for each login. Strong passwords contain at least eight random characters of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.
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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.