CAROLYN GRANT
I get lots of emails during the course of my day at work; lots of them. Many are about local events and are of great interest to me. And some beg the question, why did you send me this? But then there are some that make you go, hmm, that’s interesting.
I got one of those this week from a publicist for an outfit called Lookout, which I believe is some kind of data protection company. But it was interesting.
It was all about how data breaches are increasing and how passwords can pop up on the dark web.
Now I’ve heard of the dark web but I’ve never really had a good look at what it is. So I decided to investigate and I learned some things.
Things such as the fact that only a tiny portion of the internet, the ‘clear web’ is accessible through a standard browser like Chrome or Firefox. Something called the ‘deep web’ is actually between 96 and 99 per cent of internet content. According to the site csoonline.com, deep web refers to anything on the internet that is not indexed by and, therefore, accessible via a search engine like Google. Deep web content includes anything behind a paywall or requires sign-in credentials. It also includes any content that its owners have blocked web crawlers from indexing. So it could be medical records, fee-based content, membership websites and more.
The dark web is also not accessible by search engines and it is a hotbed of criminal activity according to csoonline.com. Researchers say that 57 per cent of dark web sites host illicit material.
“You can buy credit card numbers, all manner of drugs, guns, counterfeit money, stolen subscription credentials, hacked Netflix accounts and software that helps you break into other people’s computers.”
You need a special browser, Tor, to access the dark web.
In any event what interested me is that people’s passwords often end up on the dark web. And once they are there, hackers have pretty ready access to your information.
So what the email from Lookout told me was the top 20 passwords found on the dark web and they are, hoo boy, not real difficult to figure out. In fact they are the first thing one would try when trying to guess a password. For instance number one password is 123456. Yes. You read that right. There are geniuses out there that think that’s a safe password.
The second most common password? 123456789. Yes, adding those three additional numbers sure showed them.
Also popular: qwerty. Which is of course the top left row on the keyboard. Coming in at number 4 is literally ‘password’.
Numerical combinations abound. 1111111 and 123123 and 0 and ABC123. Also 666666.
So if your password is even remotely as simple as any of the above, it’s time to change it.
And yes, it’s difficult to remember passwords. The solution I came up with years ago was to have one really complicated password, a combination of letters and numbers, upper and lower case, and just memorize it. Then I have three or four additional endings to the password, more letters and numbers, which I vary. So if I’m prompted for my password and can’t remember, I know that it starts with the same eight letters and then I only have to run through the four possible endings for it.
It works for me. It may not work for you. But come up with something better than qwerty will you?