A new survey just revealed some of the easiest passwords to hack-- and a few familiar Minnesota words are on the list.

If you ask me, there are fewer things more annoying than constantly having to change your passwords. And we all have a TON of them to remember these days, because it seems you need a username and password for EVERYTHING, right? Fact: You'll soon need a password to go to the bathroom. (Okay, I made that up-- but I wouldn't be surprised if that's not too far off.) So I can understand why we want to use easy-to-remember words and numbers as passwords.

But the problem is, if your password is easy for you to remember, it's also probably easy for cyber creeps to hack. In fact, a new survey from the National Cyber Security Centre (that'd be England's version of the National Security Agency) just published a list of the most-hacked passwords.

And, surprisingly, '123456' is still the most-hacked password. (Yes, people-- 23.2 million of them-- have been hacked because that was their password.) That's followed by '123456789,' 'qwerty,' 'password,' and '1111111.'

But according to this BringMeTheNews story, several familiar Minnesota words also popped up on the most-hacked list. Fortunately, though, 'Rochester' didn't make the cut. But fellow words like 'Minnesota,' 'Minnesota1,' 'Vikings,' 'Prince1999,' 'St.Paul,' and even 'Duluth' made the list.

So if you're using any of those common Minnesota words or phrases--without any extra numbers, signs or other unique personalizations-- you may want to...gulp... change those passwords. Because being 'Minnesota nice' won't work against those cyber criminals out to hack into your accounts!

Listen to Curt St. John mornings from 6 to 10 a.m. on Quick Country 96.5
and afternoons from 2 to 6 p.m. on 103.9 The Doc

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