Top Password? 123456

The New York Times examines the most common passwords: Imperva analyzed a stolen cache of 32m passwords, and found 1 percent of accounts were secured with 123456; the second most used, 12345. The No. 4 password? password. The majority of passwords are eight or fewer characters, and 20 percent are from a pool of 5,000 passwords.

This reaffirms what I've been writing here for many years when I publish the advice of security experts. Except in cases in which a weak algorithm is involved that allows passwords of any type to be extracted, strong password algorithms must be coupled with longer passwords that contain a mix of letters, numbers, and, where possible, punctuation.

With Wi-Fi, a 12-character mixed password is probably uncrackable even by government's, while a 20-character passphrase would survive the heat death of the universe.

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