Simon Cox Blog: Beware of Making Jesus Your Password

Friday, 6 January 2017

Beware of Making Jesus Your Password

These 75 popular Christian phrases and Bible verses are too predictable to be secure from hackers.

At first glance, “john316” looks like a reasonable password.

While it’s a couple characters short of the recommended minimum of 8 to 10, it at least mixes numbers and letters.

But “john316” is not a good choice for keeping your account safe. It’s the most common Bible verse used as a password, according to a new analysis of a list of 32 million passwords leaked in a 2009 data breach.

And beware the power of Jesus’ name—for hackers.

Another too-popular choice is “jesus,” or variants like “jesus777” and “jesus143.” Collectively, more than 21,000 people in the breach used the Son of God’s name as a password, making it the 30th most common password overall, a bit behind “tigger” (No. 22) and ahead of “football” (No. 45).

You want a password to be unguessable. If you use your life verse as your password—say, for your church’s financial software—you’re opening yourself and your church to potential hacking by choosing something easy to predict.

If you do use a Bible reference or something related to Christianity as a password, be sure to include hard-to-guess letters, numbers, or symbols as part of it. Also consider including unrelated words or phrases. The key is to be unpredictable.

Your favorite Bible verse, which you possibly have set as the wallpaper on your phone, is too easy. Similarly, you should avoid using the names of your loved ones, especially if their names are “Nicole” or “Soccer”—the 12th and 13th most popular overall passwords in the list.

Below are the top Christianity-related passwords from the data breach; the last column shows the number of times the ...