Twitter's step towards password security

Social networking site Twitter has banned 370 words it considers ‘too obvious’ to be used as passwords.

Twitter rejects certain words like ‘123456’ and ‘password’ to be used as passwords because it thinks they are too easy to guess and put users data at risk.

Along with, names of famous cars such as ‘porsche’ and ‘ferrari’, and football teams like ‘Chelsea’ and ‘Arsenal’ are also banned. A few science fiction words are also a part of the banned word list of the website.

‘THX1138’-- title of the first film by Star Wars fame director George Lucas, is banned. So is ‘NCC1701’ -- the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise -- and ‘trustno1’, Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files, the report said.

A recent research by insurer CPP has shown that people are often too predictable when it comes to choosing passwords.

Security experts advise that a strong password should consist of letters, numbers and even punctuation symbols. They should be changed regularly and one should not use the same password for their online services.