Twitter bans 370 'obvious' passwords

Twitter has banned 370 words that it considers “too obvious” to be used as passwords for the service.

The micro-blogging service rejects certain passwords when new users sign up if it thinks they are too easy to guess. However, bloggers recently discovered that the list of banned passwords is embedded in the source code of the page itself.

Banned terms include commonly chosen generic passwords, such as “123456”, “password” and “password1”, as well as car names (“porsche”, “ferrari”) and football teams (“Chelsea”, “arsenal”).

Perhaps predictably for a website popular with technology fans, science fiction terms figure in the list too. “THX1138”, the title of the first feature film directed by George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is banned, as is “NCC1701” – the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise – and “trustno1”, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files.

Research has shown that people are often all too predictable when it comes to choosing passwords. In research published earlier this year, insurer CPP found that nearly half of Britons use the same password to login to their banking, shopping and social networking sites. The research also found that one in five people use their pets’ names for their passwords, while one in eight use memorable dates, such as birthdays, and one in ten use their children’s names.

Security experts advise that a strong password should consist of letters, numbers and even punctuation symbols. They should be changed regularly and you should not use the same password for all your online services.

-- The Telegraph 2010-01-03

If they really want to help people, they should insist on a combination of upper, lower case, and numbers for the password to be valid.

141. george

The full list available here

Edited January 4, 201016 yr by Phil Conners