Every day on our smartphone and on our pc we use various passwords to access our social profiles and use various online services. Everyone has forgotten at least one and naively simplified it without thinking about the risks behind it.
Lots of them are stolen on the web every day. Suffice it to say that in June the largest list of personal credentials was published on the web. More than eight billion passwords, a figure higher than that of the world population.
NordPass, a password management service, has published the annual ranking of the most used access keys by Italians and the average time it takes to crack them. Each person has an average of 100 personal accounts, each of which is associated with a password. What emerges from the research is that Italians are not so attentive to IT security.
In Italy, the most used password remains the classic “123456”. In the top 10 we also find some of its numerical variants, but the surprise is at position number six where «Juventus» is located. The Bianconeri are the sixth most used password in Italy: 223 thousand Italians choose it, but they do not know that this access key can be cracked in less than a second.
The same fate also affects the 167 thousand people who use “Napoli”, “qwerty” and “password” as passwords. After position number ten there are various proper names such as “Francesco”, “Andrea”, “Giuseppe”, “Alessandro”, “Antonio” and “Francesca”. Breaking the «Andrea» password takes an average of two minutes while for «Giuseppe» three hours.
Among the top 40 there are also more creative witty solutions, including some curses that reach a degree of complexity that takes up to 12 days to steal it.
Even in the other countries analyzed, such as Germany and France, the situation does not change. You will always find extremely simple passwords like “qwerty” and “000000”. In the United States at number 14 is “Monkey” and at number 18 one of the favorite sports of the American public: “Baseball”. While the English also choose football teams as a password: in third position there is “Liverpool”, in tenth “Arsenal1”, in eleventh “Chelsea”, at number thirty-three “Everton” and in thirty-sixth “Manchester”.
How can this trend be reversed? It is essential to choose a different and secure password for each account.