What is the world's weakest password?

In an article today on The Guardian's website, they've shared security firm SplashData's findings on the worst passwords used.

Password '123456' has been named as the worst one for 2014, and is joined in the top 10 by various other number-only passwords.

While SplashData do make password management software, they claim its "worst passwords" are based on a list of 3.3m leaked passwords last year specific to North America and western Europe.

The company do argue that evidence shows that people are still using favourite sports teams, birth years and their children's names as passwords. The article explains that this information could be found out relatively easily by cybercriminals and weak passwords are a particular security mishap when we use the same ones for multiple services.

Click here to read the full article.

With the goal of providing interesting, relevant and useful tasks for the new computing curriculum, we created a mystery called Bob's Algorithm. While the task helps students learn about how an algorithm works, they are also helped to create unique, safe and memorable passwords for all of their favourite websites. It's a concept that can be tweaked in lots of different ways to make it as secure as possible.

If you'd like to try this task free on Windows, please contact info@reflectivethinking.com with your name, role, school name and the number of computers you'd like to try it on.

To try on the iPad, click here.

Thanks,

Natalie Taylor