Between Nick and I having time off last week, I wasn't able to give him his facts of the day in a timely manner.

I have been off setting this omission by adding some additional facts, here is another for today.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with passwords.

Recently, with the hacking of Sony user database as well as various banks, there has been a lot of attention to people's passwords.

Various hacking groups have posted the information on websites for other hackers, and security analysts have downloaded the information in an attempt to make our passwords more secure.

The results of this scrutiny have caused some companies to change the types of passwords they allow us to use, requiring the addition of numbers and non-alphanumeric characters in our passwords.

A recent study by one of these analysts has shown that 14 percent of the passwords used are given names.

Of these names, the top three used are,

maggie
michael
jennifer

The same study showed that 25 percent of passwords come from the dictionary.

The top three used of these are:

password
monkey
dragon

In addition, many use the same passwords for every site they access.

Is it any wonder that so many find their accounts hacked?