So I saw a link to this site: http://www.whatsmypass.com/?p=415
These are supposedly top 500 passwords. Fill me in on the cultural and psychological references.
123456, and variations thereon - well, obviously
password - yep, sure
pussy - prurient but why not?
dragon - umm, what? No. 7 on the list? Why?
Same with mustang, master, monkey, shadow, ranger, hunter, trustno1.
Why are these so popular?
Because they sound cool.
Wasn’t trustno1 Mulder’s password in one episode? I would imagine that was why it is popular.
OK I get ‘trustno1’ now :smack:
The others: “dragon” is so cool it makes number 7 of (presumably) thousands upon thousands of passwords surveyed?
Hey, what’s cooler than a dragon?
Pussy
Apparently.
A dragon with an arrow in it at the bottom of a lake.
Darn it, now I guess I’ll have to stop using dragonpussy1 as my usual password.
“dragon - umm, what? No. 7 on the list? Why?”
Because there are tons of people who like fantasy out there? And I can’t imagine a string of random characters is going to beat it out.
mustang - lots of car fanatics out there
master - “master password”, I’m guessing.
monkey - haven’t you always wanted a monkey?
shadow - probably at the top of a “top 10 pet names” list
ranger - no idea
hunter - maybe a common pet name
People need to remember their passwords, and often don’t realize how easily they can be guessed. So many are taken from favorite popular culture references (I knew a fundie whose password was “god”) or things they can easily remember.
“Joshua,” anyone?
How did they get the list?
And, where’s “Swordfish” from the Marx Bros?
You know those emails telling you your Myspace/Facebook/BoA/Goatsx account was going to be closed if you didn’t fill in the form right away? That wasn’t a scam. It was just this site doing legitimate research!
Where’s “admin” on that last? Or perhaps they’re not counting the common default passwords.
Looking at that list, I wonder if online games are included in the source of passwords/accounts. If yes, that would explain dragon, hunter, ranger and possibly shadow, monkey and master.
Hunter and Ranger could be favorite WOW and D&D classes, respectively.
It was his e-mail address in the episode “trust no 1.”
Yeah, but not a real monkey, that would be cruel.
What? No “V1@GR@”?
My first name shows up on the list, which is…odd.
What’s even more interesting is that my default password for signing up to low-priority stuff (newspaper sites, frex) isn’t on the list. Who knew that adding a couple of numbers at the end would make it “safe”?
Mine does also.
BTW, these are the 500 worst passwords, not the 500 most popular ones, which would be a bit hard to figure out.