RENO, Nev. (KOLO) - At The Computer Guy, technicians do plenty of repairs on computer hardware and motherboards. According to the supervisor, customers are often asked their passwords to work on the computers.
Ryan Hyde / CC BY-SA 2.0 Colin / CC BY-SA 4.0
"I'd say about 80% are simple, not secure. Yeah passwords. "Password" 1,2,3,4,5,6, qwerty, that kind of stuff. Pet's name, kids' names." Says Wyatt Soulam, supervisor at The Computer Guy.
And as The Computer Guy goes...so goes the country, at least according to SplashData, a computer security agency. According to its fifth annual survey of most frequent passwords leaked during the year, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, "password" and q-w-e-r-t-y are some of the most popular. Also the most unsecured. That leaves those who use such passwords vulnerable to hackers.
By the way, those passwords have not changed since the survey began.
SplashData is sympathetic in that computer users have many passwords to keep in their heads, and often they have to change every 90 days for security reasons. That's why they recommend a password manager like Dashlane or Lastpass to avoid using the same passwords at more than one site.
Soulam also showed us a computer site called howsecureismypassword.net. There you can test a new password to see how secure it is, and how long it would take hackers to gain access.
Soulam says take care using other sites that promise to help you develop a secure password.
"I trust this one. If you go to some other site, and start typing in your passwords, they might take them," he says.
