The Importance of Setting Strong Account Credentials

Common passwords and their risk

The study, carried out by Google between March 2016 and March 2017, is quite the shocker: the company’s researchers managed to identify “788,000 potential victims of off-the-shelf keyloggers; 12.4 million potential victims of phishing kits; and 1.9 billion usernames and passwords exposed via data breaches and traded on the black market.” Google’s study also points out that one of the most commonly used methods for individuals to find out peoples’ credentials is infecting the device with malware.

However, if malware infection, phishing schemes and the like are put aside, the main reason why many credentials are so easily obtained is poor password choice. In fact, according to the Google study, the top 10 most used passwords found in recent plaintext leaks include several variations of ‘123456′, ‘password’, ‘password1′, ‘abc123′ and ‘homelesspa’. Maybe the latter needs some explanation: it was added to Google’s study as “the most common [password] in the MySpace credential leak.”

Although the poor security of these passwords was confirmed several times, it’s surprising to see how many people still rely on them. This just underlines what we said before: few people pay the necessary attention to strong credentials. As a matter of fact, the MySpace password we mentioned earlier that is used by over 855,000 users is the one automatically generated by the service after creating an account. This indicates that almost a million people didn’t even bother to change the default password.

Considering everything mentioned above it’s easy to guess that the re-use of credentials is another reason of major data leaks identified by Google: in their own words “17.0% of the 22 million email addresses in multiple leaks re-used a password at least once”.

Using password managers

Seeing how easily our online identities could be stolen it’s crucial to have strong credentials for all online services, regardless of how often said services are used. And one of the best methods to avoid being forced to memorize multiple, complex passwords is using a password manager.

Keeping passwords and other types of credentials in a password manager is indeed safe, but combining such a solution with VPNs is even better. With a VPN by your side all connections through which you login to your online accounts are encrypted, ensuring that your credentials are securely transferred. Any other credentials and data you send over your connection are also kept private as you use the IP address of the VPN server rather than your own IP address assigned to you by your ISP. This way eavesdroppers, authorities and any other third parties won’t have a chance at snooping on your passwords and the activity through your online accounts.