Hotmail Scam Reveals Most Common Password: 123456

Notebook & Pen to write down websites & passwords= $3 give or take

Not having your $h!t hacked into= priceless

What I want to know is how did they get the passwords to peoples accounts? I have to make a list for a friend of all of his passwords for all of his sites he is on and banking, phone, etc. I always ask him why doesn't he just use the same one for everyplace? Or at least a combination of the same thing?

For 18 years I have used my daughters name plus eitehr the same two numbers or the same 4 numbers depending on if I need a 5 6 or 8 character password

What aggravates the hell out of me is these sites that have such ridiculously strict requirements.

A Capital letter, a symbol, a lower case and a number but oh the numbers can't be the same two in a row. For god's sake

No one is going to guess my password anyway so why the dashes and the upper vs lower case?

Why is the person that has the password at fault? It really shouldn't matter WHAT the password is...he/she has a password..that SHOULD be enough. But nnoooo. To REALLY be secure we need to use an uncommon password. To be EXTRA EXTRA secure we should change our passoword every thirty days. It doesn't matter how secure you are. If someone REALLY wants your information, they're going to get it. All they have to do is work for the company or bribe a person working at the company.

I've got three different passwords I'll use so I'm not using the same one for everything (hellish trying to remember which one I used where at times). If you want something you can remember that no one else will guess... pick a random letter. Pick a word. Pick a number. Put them together. It's that easy. I hate to admit I'm one of the 42% that uses only lowercase letters. But I'm also one of the smart 6% that includes a number.

qwertyu is another biggie along with the account name as the pass word. Another fave is F**KY*U Gee, I wonder why so many people get hacked?

LOL Ed! That was the first thought in my mind when I read this. I thought, "wouldn't Skroob love this?". Gave me a chuckle for the day. Think I'll go watch the movie now.

I cant believe that someone..well 64 someones,lol would use that as a password.
Thats probably the first combo that a hacker would use,even if ya did it backwords.My password is the same on most of my dealings on the computer but its a combo of fruit+animals that i doubt that anyone would ever begin to find
it out,lol.

Damb this news story. Thay gave out my password.

It is extremely hard in this day and age to keep up with passwords. I have a job where I have at least 20 just at work! Then at home, I have several emails, one is for friends to contact me with, one is for work related items, and the other is for ordering or doing stuff on the internet. The reason for these three at home is to keep items seperated out, nothing more annoying then opening up your personal email and having a lot of junk! At any rate, I use a rolodex to keep track of my passwords for my items at home and at work. The other commentor had a good idea too; just start with an 01 or something like that behind your password and when it expires then change it to 02. Just a thought but I agree with most of the commentors on here; it's getting ridiculous! But then again, you have to stay "safe" from hackers.

Be careful if you use roboform, it's like cancer for your computer, gets into everything.

Well you have to sign up for this, log into that, and in the end you can't remember all those usernames, let alone passwords. The number seems more convenient.
I have dozens upon dozens of accounts and I don't always use the same password. I have a different password for my email, my bank account, my internet etc. If a person has one password the person might be able to unlock everything if they know your accounts sometimes simple is ok especially if the email account is just for junk email anyway.
Let them break into my junk email account, and maybe they can clean it up while they are at it.

Here's my tip for the day: use old addresses (yours or someone else's you can remember) or the name and number of the member of a sports team - gives you numbers, upper and lower case letters, and is easy to remember.

biggums5000 said "you have to dumb things down if your dumb."
That would be if you're dumb.

Having a hotmail account is so 1990's anyways. Get gmail and you won't have to deal with those scammers.

Wow. For the longest time that was my iTunes and Yahoo password. lol! :p

"password management program" Oh, great idea. What about those of us on public access computers who CAN'T use these programs? We have to keep them all in our heads or write them down somewhere where they can get loose and be discovered by others. And if the hacker knows a program requires a combination of letters and numbers for a four-character password, that's 7,321,616 combinations he doesn't have to bother trying. Want to do the math on an 8-character password?

Through work I had about 10 passwords. Couldn't all be the same because the rules conflicted. Most of them had to be changed every 90 days although a couple were 180 days. Somewhere in the bowels of the machinery my previous passwords were stored. Couldn't use a previous password because "they" checked when I submitted the new one. Had to be totally new.

The most common set of rules for the passwords (yes, I did create a set that were the same) was:
- at least 8 characters, not more than 12
- at least 2 upper case letters
- at least 3 lower case letter
- at least 2 numbers
- at least 2 special characters (e.g. *#$%&) but the set of special characters allowed weren't exactly the same for each site
- can't use any letter, number, character more than twice
- can't repeat the same character consecutively (i.e. aa is not allowed but aca would be)
- can't use letters or numbers in a series (i.e. ab or ba or 12 or 21 are not allowed)
- no words found in the dictionary (it's amazing how what you think are random letters can be found in the dictionary)
- when changing passwords the new password must be at least 2 characters different from the previous password.

Now you are trying to log into a site to do your job and it tells you to change your password. Remember, you can't write it down and you are supposed to remember it the next time you log in.

Actually, we've gotten smarter. The last "most common password" story I read said it was "password"

okay the parent control set on my ps2 password is 1111 but my more important passwords have numbers in it and different cased letters