Blackberry Bans Weak Passwords To Protect Consumers From Hackers
Blackberry Bans Weak Passwords To Protect Consumers
From Hackers.
Blackberry
may be losing ground to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android
devices. But its struggling parent company is still known for making some of the most hacker-proof smartphones on the market.
To uphold
its reputation for security, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) has
put out a list of 106 passwords that its customers are banned from using
because they are too weak. The list included "123456,"
"pookie," "butthead," "snoopy," as well as Winnie
the Pooh characters "Tigger" "piglet" and
"poohbear," and the weakest password of them all: password. A
complete list was published on the blog Rapid
Berry.
“BlackBerry
continually looks to help its customers protect their confidential
information," he said in a statement. "One element of BlackBerry’s
overall security solution is to limit commonly used passwords on BlackBerry
ID."
Blackberry's
password blacklist is part of a growing effort among tech companies to force
consumers to devise a complex string of characters to log-in to their accounts.
The reason is that most Internet users simply can't be trusted to create strong
passwords on their own, experts say. Last year, Microsoft banned weak passwords from its email service Hotmail.
Google Wallet also rejects easy-to-crack log-ins.
But
Blackberry's list of 106 banned passwords hardly covers the myriad of ways that
users leave themselves vulnerable by creating simple passwords. Hackers are now
using free password-cracking software like "John the Ripper" to test
millions of commonly-used passwords from websites that have been breached.
Such
programs are effective because most Internet users have just a few passwords
that they recycle again and again, so passwords stolen from one company's
servers likely hold the keys to accounts with other companies. A 2007 study by Microsoft found that the average Web user
keeps 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them.
Security experts say consumers
should create long, complex passwords of letters and numbers and use different
ones for each account to prevent hackers from figuring them out and wreaking
havoc on their digital lives.
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