10 passwords you shouldn’t use

There is an interesting article in today's Toronto Star about the 10 passwords you shouldn't use.

Software developer Adam Caudill parsed the 442,786 passwords exposed and published yesterday when a Yahoo server was broken into.

At the top of the list is "123456". Next came:

• password
• welcome
• ninja
• abc123
• 123456789
• 12345678
• sunshine
• princess
• qwerty

Among the other findings:

• The most common password length is eight characters (26.9 per cent), followed by six characters and then a near-tie with seven and nine characters
• One and two characters are rare for a password, as is anything over 17
• One-third of users stuck to lowercase letters for their passwords and another one-third to only letters, upper and lower case.
• Months were not a common password choice, although "May" did lure 725 users. But "March" was the most popular abbreviated month (4,718 users), followed by "January" (1,007) and "May" (725).
• The names of days spelled out were rare, but days abbreviated had a lot more fans: 4,428 for "mon", 1,237 for "sun" but only 16 for "tues".
• Year of birth might factor in to a lot of Gmail addresses but less so in passwords. The most popular were "2008" (1,145) and "2009" (1,052). The least popular was "2015" (24).
• "Red" was the most popular colour (2,201), followed by "blue" (1,143); "indigo" was the least popular (35).
• 10% of passwords stuck a single number on the end (most often "1") and 16.63 per cent used two numbers (most often "23").
• The most common three-digit password ending is "123". 

I do two of the above for the two passwords I use (each of my passwords do two different ones) ... how about you?