Estate Planning

What's the Password?

By Hull & Hull LLP

Probably '123456'. No? Try 'password', or some variation of it.

Our heads are becoming jammed with passwords. Almost every website service we visit requires a password. 

A few diverse posts that I have come across have looked at password usage. 

In one study, which lists the 500 most popular passwords, reported here, the top 4 most common passwords are said to be '123456', 'password', '12345678' and '1234'.

In another report, found here, Robert Graham writes about his analysis of the passwords of 20,000 users taken from a popular website and posted by a hacker.

He finds:

-16% of the passwords matched or were based on a person's first name;

-14% were patterns on the keyboard, such as '123456' (I thought I was the only one to think of that) or 'qwerty' or '1qaz2wsx' (check your keyboard);

-4% were variations of the word 'password', such as 'passw0rd' or 'password1';

-4% referred to nearby items, such as the name brand on your computer or monitor;

-3% are swear words, or terms of endearment. The F-word is particularly popular;

-35% had 6 characters, 0.34% had 1 character, 1.14% had 10 characters.

See Robert Graham's report for more detail, and check out the 'Top 500' to see if your password makes the list.

As for estate practitioners, guessing their password is easy: 9 times out of 10 it is 'intervivos1'.

Thanks for reading.

Paul Trudelle

Full post as published by Toronto Estate Law Blog on May 27, 2009 (boomark / email).