By: Garin Kilpatrick

Having your passwords compromised can cause you serious stress but luckily with a few smart security strategies this stress can be easily avoided.

Hackers often begin to attempt to break into an account by repeatedly trying common passwords.  Many applications do not have a password limit restricting access after a certain number of attempts.

If you choose a weak, easy-to-guess password you are placing yourself at risk from fraud and identity theft.

Below is a list of 500 of the most commonly used passwords.

Beneath it you will find the 25 most common passwords of 2011 and some tips and tools you can use to protect your password.

Here are the 25 most common passwords of 2011, according to SplashData.

• 1. password
• 2. 123456
• 3.12345678
• 4. qwerty
• 5. abc123
• 6. monkey
• 7. 1234567
• 8. letmein
• 9. trustno1
• 10. dragon
• 11. baseball
• 12. 111111
• 13. iloveyou
• 14. master
• 15. sunshine
• 16. ashley
• 17. bailey
• 18. passw0rd
• 19. shadow
• 20. 123123
• 21. 654321
• 22. superman
• 23. qazwsx
• 24. michael
• 25. football

How To Create a Secure Password

There are a number of password generating tools that will create strong passwords for you.

The Secure Password Generator from PCTools is one powerful tool that allows you to set a variety of parameters so that you can create a random password that will comply with a website’s password policy.

The passwords generated with this tool are highly secure and extremely difficult to crack or guess due to an optional combination of lower and upper case letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.

Free Password Management Software

The problem with random passwords is that they are really difficult to remember. A solution is a password manager, such as the open sourced freeware KeePass.

KeePass stores all your passwords in an encrypted database, which can only be unlocked by your master password.

As well as compatibility with PC, Mac and Linux, there are BlackBerry, iPhone, PalmOS, Windows Phone 7 andAndroid apps available for it, too.

Other Password Safety Tips

Don’t use the same password for multiple accounts.  If you do and one of your passwords is compromised this will give the person who has it the key to multiple outlets of your identity.

Avoid making the mistake of saving your passwords in a document named “passwords” or some other intuitive file name.

Make sure to enable secure browsing (https://) for your Gmail, Facebook, and other websites if you are ever accessing these accounts from a public wi-fi hotspot, since there are applications like firesheep which make it incredibly easy for people to jack your password if you don’t have secure browsing enabled, no matter how random your password is.

The only way to have confidence in the security of your password is to make sure you only access your accounts from your own computers, and that you log out of these accounts whenever you are not using them so that others cannot log on and install surveillance software when you are not around.

If you are accessing your public account from someone else’s computer there is a slight chance that they may have surveillance software installed that can record your password so just to be safe you might want to check the list of running applications and make sure that there is no active keylogging software running in the background.

Feedback

Have you ever had your password hacked? Are there any other tips tips you can recommend for keeping your password safe? Let us know in the comments below.