Using a pattern of consecutive characters, whether diagonally, horizontally or vertically, as if it were a lock pattern on a mobile phone, is not the best idea when it comes to creating a strong password.
Many of us are tired of being reminded of the importance of setting a strong password for our online accounts, but there are still cases where poor quality passwords are allowed to slip through in the belief that they are sufficiently random. But they are not. Some users use passwords of the type known as “keyword walk”, perhaps unaware that such passwords are easier to capture than other truly random sequences of letters and numbers.
People usually avoid using simple codes such as our birthday, our dog’s name or even our mother’s surname. But in order to not give up a password that is easy to remember, they resort to another method that is not at all secure. “Keyword walk” refers to that typical movement by which, to create a sequence of characters that is, in principle, random, we simply move our finger across the keyboard.
This is not a recommended practice, as it is very easy to tell which order the keys are in, whether vertical or horizontal, and almost all keyboards in the world follow one of the three main layouts: ‘Qwerty’, ‘Azerty’ and ‘Qwertz’. Passwords created this way are easier to guess: this is indicated by a recent study. investigation from Specops Software, which found the ‘qwerty’ pattern (these keys follow one another on the first row of the keyboard) more than 1 million times in a database of 800 million leaked passwords.
This pattern can also occur with numbers, for example with passwords like “76543” or “7890”. Other cases are the passwords “asdfg”, “tress”, “zxcvbnm” or “drews”, also detected a large number of times.
It is important to remember that hackers will not normally try to crack a password manually, but will use automatic “brute force” tools capable of trying thousands of passwords in seconds, with the “keyword walk” type being among the easiest to crack.
There is no need to be lazy
The IT security specialist advises those responsible for cybersecurity in companies to block this type of password to prevent employees from using them for convenience. There are password auditing tools that can regulate the use of passwords by employees, preventing them from using overly simple patterns, reused parts, user names or consecutive characters.
Although the goal is to not spend time creating a password, or to be able to remember it easily, it is essential to create a truly random password with special characters, as the main online platforms already require. To help you remember them, taking into account that you would have to use a different one for each site, we can use a password manager.
