Hard to believe people still are this naive. The best way I have found to pick a personally memorable password that others cannot easily guess is to take some letter of every word in some familear phrase: the result looks like jibberish to those who do not know the secret. For example, taking the 1st letter of every word in “Mary had a little lamb, it’s fleece was white as snow” would give you “Mhallifwwas”. Be sure it is at least 8 characters long to make it harder to reverse engineer with a rainbow table, use a different password for each significant web site, and you should be as safe as you are going to be.
See the article here: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/monkey-dragon-football-and-rest-2011s-worst-p
1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1
10. dragon
11. baseball
12. 111111
13. iloveyou
14. master
15. sunshine
16. ashley
17. bailey
18. passw0rd
19. shadow
20. 123123
21. 654321
22. superman
23. qazwsx
24. michael
25. football
I did not see ‘liverpool’ in this list, which is reported to be common in GB. Additional comments on passwords can be found along side other useful security information on the Smoothe Wall Ltd web site at http://www.smoothwall.net/resources/password-advice/.
More lists are at http://www.whatsmypass.com/the-top-500-worst-passwords-of-all-time, http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/business-brains/top-20-most-common-passwords-of-all-time-revealed-8216123456-8216princess-8216qwerty/4519, http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/worst-internet-passwords/
And some interesting information from the Huffington Post on passwords used in a database that got hacked (and, obviously, published so the passwords became public knowledge) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/most-common-passwords_n_796626.html
On Sunday, hackers exposed usernames and passwords stored in the Gawker Media user database.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed the leaked data and produced a list of the top 50 commonly used Gawker passwords. Believe it or not, the list is rife with security no-nos, such as ascending numbers and easy-to-guess words.
The following are the top 13 most popular passwords, according to WSJ’s examination of the 188,279 passwords that were leaked:
123456
password
12345678
lifehack
qwerty
abc123
111111
monkey
consumer
12345
0
letmein
trustno1It is startling to note that over 3,000 users chose “123456” as their login password, according to the Journal. Almost as jarring: Nearly 2,000 people went with “password,” and more than 1,000 users decided that “12345678” was a secure choice. The list also includes “gizmodo” (#19), “starwars” (#23), “f—you” (#31), “gawker” (#40) and “internet” (#50). … Visit the Journal to view the complete list of passwords, as well as interesting patterns in the leaked data.