Are You Making This Common Mistake with Your Passwords? 🤦‍♀️

When I think about cybersecurity, I always think of passwords. It’s the first line of defense for almost all of my online accounts, but it’s a part of our security that we often overlook. A recent report about a McDonald’s chatbot showed that even major companies can make massive security mistakes by using incredibly weak passwords.

Table of Contents

1. Why Is This So Dangerous? The Domino Effect
1.1 The Dangers of Reusing Passwords
1.1.1 Create an Unforgettable Master Password
1.1.2 Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA) Everywhere
1.2 What About Browser Extensions?

The chatbot, which was used to hire staff, was accessible with the username and password ‘123456’. Security researchers were able to gain full access to the application in just 30 minutes, potentially exposing the personal details of 64 million applicants. While the company behind the chatbot, Paradox.ai, quickly resolved the issue, this incident highlights the immense importance of strong passwords.

Why Is This So Dangerous? The Domino Effect

The danger isn’t that a hacker will guess your strong password. The danger is that they don’t have to. The real threat is credential stuffing.

Here’s how it works:

The Breach: A website you use—let’s say an old online store or a gaming forum—suffers a data breach. Hackers steal its entire user database, including usernames, emails, and passwords. This happens every single day to companies big and small.
The Leak: These stolen lists of credentials (email/password combinations) are then bought, sold, or shared on the dark web.
The Stuffing: Automated bots take these massive lists and “stuff” the credentials into the login pages of other, more valuable websites—like Gmail, Amazon, Netflix, and especially banking portals.
The Compromise: The bot doesn’t know you. It’s just trying your leaked email/password combination everywhere. The moment it finds a match on another site, it has access.

It’s like having one key that unlocks your house, your car, your office, and your safety deposit box. If a thief steals that one key from your least secure location (like the lock on your garden shed), everything you own is now compromised.

The Dangers of Reusing Passwords

One of the biggest mistakes we make is reusing passwords across different sites. For example, if you used your Co-op password for any other account, you should change that too after their recent data breach. Hackers often use stolen login credentials from one site and test them on thousands of other popular services. An estimated 6.5 million Co-op members had their details stolen, so if you are one of them, act now.

A simple way to avoid this is to use a password manager like Bitwarden. These tools can generate and store strong, unique passwords for every single account you have, so you don’t have to remember them all. It’s a small step that can make a huge difference in protecting your digital life.

Create an Unforgettable Master Password

Since you only need to remember one password now, make it count. The best modern approach is a passphrase.

What it is: A sequence of 4-6 random, unrelated words.
Example: CorrectHorseBatteryStaple or OceanBicycleCoffeeWindow
Why it’s strong: It’s very long, making it incredibly difficult for computers to brute-force, yet it’s far easier for a human to remember than a random string of characters. A 4-word passphrase can be astronomically stronger than a “complex” 8-character password.
- An 8-character password using upper/lower case letters, numbers, and symbols has roughly 948 possible combinations.
- A 4-word passphrase from a list of 7,776 common words has 77764 combinations, which is a vastly larger number and much harder to crack.

Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA) Everywhere

This is your most critical safety net. MFA requires a second piece of information besides your password to log in, usually a code from your phone.

How it helps: Even if a hacker steals your password, they can’t access your account because they don’t have your phone to get the code.
Best Practice: Use an authenticator app (like Google Authenticator, Authy, or Microsoft Authenticator) or a physical security key (like a YubiKey) instead of SMS/text message codes, which are vulnerable to “SIM swapping” attacks.

What About Browser Extensions?

It’s not just websites and chatbots you need to be careful with. Security researchers have also urged users to uninstall Chrome and Edge browser extensions that have infected 2.3 million users with malware. These extensions can track every URL you visit and send that data to hackers.

The malware was added through an update that was automatically installed later, making it difficult for antivirus software to detect. You should be careful about which extensions you install and remove any you don’t recognize.

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