By Ernest Rauthschild
The micro-blogging service rejects certain passwords when new users sign up if it thinks they are too easy to guess. However, bloggers recently discovered that the list of banned passwords is embedded in the source code of the page itself.
Banned terms include commonly chosen generic passwords, such as “123456”, “password” and “password1”, as well as car names (“porsche”, “ferrari”) and football teams (“Chelsea”, “arsenal”).
No need for a smoking ban in pubs when market forces could provide a choice
Man in Guatemala arrested for Twitter messagesPerhaps predictably for a website popular with technology fans, science fiction terms figure in the list too. “THX1138”, the title of the first feature film directed by George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is banned, as is “NCC1701” – the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise – and “trustno1”, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files.
Research has shown that people are often all too predictable when it comes to choosing passwords. In research published earlier this year, insurer CPP found that nearly half of Britons use the same password to login to their banking, shopping and social networking sites. The research also found that one in five people use their pets’ names for their passwords, while one in eight use memorable dates, such as birthdays, and one in ten use their children’s names.
Security experts advise that a strong password should consist of letters, numbers and even punctuation symbols. They should be changed regularly and you should not use the same password for all your online services.
The micro-blogging service rejects certain passwords when new users sign up if it thinks they are too easy to guess. However, bloggers recently discovered that the list of banned passwords is embedded in the source code of the page itself. Banned terms include commonly chosen generic passwords, such as “123456”, “password” and “password1”, as well as car names (“porsche”, “ferrari”) and football teams (“Chelsea”, “arsenal”).
No need for a smoking ban in pubs when market forces could provide a choice
Man in Guatemala arrested for Twitter messagesPerhaps predictably for a website popular with technology fans, science fiction terms figure in the list too. “THX1138”, the title of the first feature film directed by George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is banned, as is “NCC1701” – the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise – and “trustno1”, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files.
Research has shown that people are often all too predictable when it comes to choosing passwords. In research published earlier this year, insurer CPP found that nearly half of Britons use the same password to login to their banking, shopping and social networking sites. The research also found that one in five people use their pets’ names for their passwords, while one in eight use memorable dates, such as birthdays, and one in ten use their children’s names. Security experts advise that a strong password should consist of letters, numbers and even punctuation symbols. They should be changed regularly and you should not use the same password for all your online services.
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