Is Your Favorite Team a Good Password?

A favorite team, band, game or TV show is a natural thing to build a password from. You'll never forget it, and you probably type its name every week anyway. The trouble is that the things you love most are also the things you talk about most.

Your fandom is public

• Posts on match days, album drops and season finales show what you follow, and how much.
• Profile pictures, banners and bios often show a team crest, a band logo or a character.
• Usernames like gunner4life or swiftie89 give away the fandom and sometimes a number too.
• Groups and forums you've joined list your interests for anyone to see.

Millions of fans pick the same words

A personal password should be unique to you. A team name is shared by every other fan. Sports words like football and baseball turn up on published lists of the most common passwords year after year, so they're among the first words cracking tools try.

The numbers fans add

The number after the name usually comes from the fandom too: a favorite player's shirt number, the year the club was founded, or the year of a famous win. These are easy to look up, and guessers try them right after the name. Swapping letters for symbols doesn't help much either. Read why p@ssw0rd isn't stronger.

What to use instead

• Use a password manager to create a long, random password for each account.
• For the few passwords you have to remember, use a passphrase of four or more random words with nothing to do with your interests.
• Use a different password for every account, so one leak can't unlock the rest.
• Turn on two-factor authentication, so a guessed password isn't enough on its own.

Practice spotting it in a game

Guess The Password is a free password guessing game built on habits like this one. Each level gives you a fictional person's profile, chats and posts, and you crack their password from the clues they left. Every person and password in it is made up. There's also the Daily Cipher, a new password to crack every day.

Seeing how quickly a "personal" password falls is the fastest way to stop using one.

Play free in your browserTry today's Daily Cipher

More on passwords

• Why your password is easy to guess: the 7 habits hackers look for
• Is your pet's name a safe password?
• Is it safe to use your birthday in a password?
• Does p@ssw0rd make a password stronger?
• Games like The Password Game