Recently, I came across a video on YouTube. It was a conversation between Edward Snowden (I didn’t completely read the wiki, I swear) and Joe Rogan. The podcast is for about three hours, and I saw a clip of that one for twenty-four minutes. Those few minutes of conservation gave me a panic attack. Lol. Edward points out how smartphones monitor us and how they stay active even when the screen is locked or turned off. The mobile nudges you every minute with a bunch of notifications. He also points out that the basic phones with removable batteries are better, but it’s way harder to go back to button phones.
In the same week, I read an article about data breaches. The breaches happen even at giant companies, and here are the numbers for 2022 and 2021. In the world of the tech era, it is getting difficult to protect your passwords, credentials, important documents, etc. We have “n” a number of accounts (bank accounts, Gmail, Outlook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Amazon, and so on), and creating a unique password for each one of them is such a hectic task. The most tedious task of creating passwords is remembering them exactly. This reminds me of a meme.
This has happened a lot. Setting a unique and strong password is important. I read that adding salt and pepper to the password makes it even harder to crack. Here is an article that explains it well.
NordPass, one of the password managers, has recently published an article on the top 200 most common passwords.
Top five passwords used in the World
- password
- 123456
- 123456789
- guest
- qwerty
Top five passwords used in India
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- bigbasket
- 123456789
They listed the passwords used by major countries like the US, UK, Germany, France, China, etc, and here is the link. The most common ones are “iloveyou”, “liverpool”, “arsenal”, hello, “welcome”, “Saibaba”, etc. Verify to see how many of the passcodes match the top 200 and if so, change them.
Having a password as the password to your site is one of the easiest and fastest ways to crack it, as it is used by many. Creating a strong, different password that’s hard to guess and uncommon is advised. Two-factor authentication can also be enabled so that a notification will be received if someone tries to access it. Most smartphones include an inbuilt vault or secure folder. Apart from that, there are a lot of password managers, some of which are paid and some of which are free for personal use, where your credentials can be protected.
Cheers!
Random Whys 