Are you a victim of identity theft or just a dumbass?
February 13th, 2009The FTC estimates that about 9 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. The majority of these victims are just dumbasses.
According to an article by Christopher Knoll , the most commonly used password is still everyone’s favorite…123456!
An excerpt reads:
“Recently a niche programming-oriented website called phpbb.com had its user database hacked into and the passwords for 20,000 members stolen. The hacker who broke in then posted the account info and passwords online for the world to see. And while this is really bad news for those 20,000 unlucky souls, it offers an instructive lesson on password security for the rest of us.
InformationWeek analyzed the hacked password list and found a number of interesting trends in the data, primarily revolving around the fact that most people do exactly what they’ve been told not to do since passwords were first invented.
Author/analyst Robert Graham has tons of analysis on offer. I’m ordering my favorite/most enlightening data points from the piece here, starting with the most interesting. On thing to remember: These passwords are from a group of people interested in computer programming, so if anyone should know better, it’s these guys.
> The most popular password (3.03% of the 20,000) was “123456.” It’s also generally considered the most common password used today.
> 4 percent used some variant of the word “password.” Seriously, people, there’s no excuse for this one. “password” was the 2nd most popular password used, also in keeping with historical trends.
> 16 percent of passwords were a person’s first name. No word on if it was their first name, but someone’s. Joshua is the most commonly used first-name password, a likely reference to the movie WarGames.
> Patterns abound. In addition to “123456,” other pattens like “12345, “qwerty,” and “abc123″ were common, comprising 14 percent of the passwords used.
> 35 percent of passwords were six characters long. 0.34 percent were only one character long.
> For reasons no one can explain, “dragon,” “master,” and “killer” all crack the top 20 passwords. (On the top 500 password list linked above, “dragon” is #7.)”
Most of what the public is told about identity theft makes it seem like there are people constantly waiting to dig through your trash to find credit card statements, bank statements, utility bills or any other type of identifying information. I’m gonna take a guess and say that most of the dumbasses victims of identity theft just don’t protect their online accounts. I deal with dumbass clients who, on a daily basis, who would not even think twice about emailing me their credit card number, SSN and date of birth. I’m sure they are completely unaware of how many hops and different servers that information goes through before it reaches its destination.
So please, don’t be a dumbass like this guy…change your password!
