Is your password on this lady's dress?

Is your password on this lady's dress?

You should never use something like 'password', '123456' or your name as your password. Not for anything. Most people know this, yet plenty of us still do it.

Now artist Lorrie Cranor has come up with an original way to highlight rubbish passwords. She's had them printed on a dress.

Yes, she really has. No, this isn't a joke.

As Lorrie explains over on her blog, she used Wordle to create a word cloud of the most popular passwords revealed by the RockYou hack, then rearranged the resulting words before having them printed onto fabric.

She subsequently made this into a striking dress. The larger the word, the more common the password.

As way to start conversations about IT security, we suspect this is hard to beat. And given the coverage it has received, it's done a good job of raising the profile of poor passwords.

Now we just have to stop using them.

• Can Microsoft Research predict your passwords?
• Are you using one of the world's worst passwords?
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