It may be one of the lesser known international holidays, but data privacy has grown in importance right alongside the increase in online usage. With our individual online presence growing ever larger, you’d think we would all be security crazy and struggle to remember all our passwords.
Online behaviour
Email provider TopMail has surveyed internet users on their password usage, and while none fell for the old “type your password here to continue” trick, they did provide some rather worrying insights into online behaviours. While it’s unclear if the mails were sent to African Princes or not, but 68% of users have sent personal information such as bank details, passwords or security question answers through email. 47% of users completed full transactions on unsecured public WiFi and an astonishing 15% have fallen victim to some sort of scam online with their bank details.
Knowing your passwords
In the same study, it was uncovered that 83% of participants recycled passwords across several different sites. Of course, it’s easy to see why people sync their passwords but this leaves users extremely vulnerable to attacks. It’s also important to ensure your password is secure to begin with and not too easy to guess.
Security group SplashData investigated the most popular passwords of 2015 and unveiled that the most popular passwords are terribly guessable. If you recognise any of these, we beg you to sort it out. The recent Ashley Madison hack, however deplorable, also provided interesting supporting evidence to the below passwords as “123456”, “12345” and “password” were the most popular passwords.
| The 25 most common passwords | |
|---|---|
| 1 | 123456 |
| 2 | password |
| 3 | 12345678 |
| 4 | qwerty |
| 5 | 12345 |
| 6 | 123456789 |
| 7 | football |
| 8 | 1234 |
| 9 | 1234567 |
| 10 | baseball |
| 11 | welcome |
| 12 | 1234567890 |
| 13 | abc123 |
| 14 | 111111 |
| 15 | 1qaz2wsx |
| 16 | dragon |
| 17 | master |
| 18 | monkey |
| 19 | letmein |
| 20 | login |
| 21 | princess |
| 22 | qwertyuiop |
| 23 | solo |
| 24 | passw0rd |
| 25 | starwars |
What WiFi
Nothing says “social evening out” like sitting in a restaurant with your face buried in your smartphone. For this reason, if you are out for dinner or walking around a built up area you are probably connected, or at least able to connect to public WiFi. These internet connections are generally unsecured and provide a hotbed for undesirables to attempt accessing your private data or redirecting users to bogus sites, where they phish for your data.
One such way to overcome these kind of data privacy issues is to use mediums such as Invizbox GO (left). Invizbox GO, a recently funded Irish Kickstarter campaign, utilised VPN technology which secures your data and provides a convenience side effect where you an access other services like US Netflix.
All in all, as consumers shift more and more towards online shopping and our data becomes increasingly digitised, everyone must take it upon themselves to secure their own data as ultimately, no-one will do it for you.
