Strong ... are your first step in securing your systems. If a password can be easily guessed or ... using a simple ... attack, your systems will be ... to hackers, worms, Strong passwords are your first step in securing your systems. If a password can be easily guessed or compromised using a simple dictionary attack, your systems will be vulnerable to hackers, worms, Trojans, and viruses.Trojan, virus, and worm authors have had great success attacking systems with weak and/or default passwords. Take IRC/Flood Trojan for example. McAfees virus profile states that IRC/Flood has over 120 variants and has infected over 60,000 machines in the last 30 days. IRC/Flood succeeds by checking for 22 different different easy to guess admin passwords (variants vary). Unfortunately, there are a lot more where IRC/Flood came from, W32/Tzet.worm, W32/Random.worm, and W32.HLLW.Gaobot.gen are in the wild just to name three.Hackers also have no problem compromising systems with weak passwords. Programs like L0pthCrack for example make the process simple and efficient. Creating a password-cracking dictionary is not even a challenge. Type the words "Creating Password Cracking Dictionaries", without the quotes, in to your favorite search engine. A comprehensive dictionary can be downloaded or created from scratch in short order.Below is a list of commonly used weak passwords that should NEVER be used. If any of these passwords look hauntingly familiar and are being used, you need to change the password immediately. Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com