Majority are scared of being hacked

WE are all guilty of using our favourite holiday destination, a pet’s name or our birth year for a memorable password across multiple sites.

But in the wake of World Password Day, which was held yesterday, a cyber security expert is warning that the importance of strong passwords on our devices and online accounts is more important than ever as hackers are targeting multiple accounts of victims due to weak and predictable passwords.

65% of people in the UK admit they are scared about being hacked in the future, with 84% thinking hackers are becoming more inventive.

Yet only a fifth of people (20%) are able to correctly identify a secure password over a compromised one which can be cracked by a computer in less than a second, and 20% admit to having just one password for multiple websites and devices.

New research by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) shows we are extremely predictable from a scammer’s perspective, with almost half using a significant date (21%) or a pet’s name (20%) as the topic of our passwords.

When we do stray away from the predictable, we aren’t putting much thought into it either, with 38% believing replacing letters with numbers e.g. p4$$w0rd is more secure when thinking about a password, with 45% believing it makes them harder to guess.

65% of people think passwords should never be written down, despite advice from cybersecurity experts, and 77% think changing passwords frequently makes them more secure, despite GCHQ recommending against this practice.

p4$$w0rd is in dictionaries of common passwords, so it can be cracked in less than a second. If you use the same password for every website and the password is breached from one site, all sites can be compromised without the attacker needing to try any other passwords - this is known as credential stuffing.