We're being encouraged to strengthen our online passwords and not to make them too Irish.
A new study released as part of Cyber Security Month looked at over 613 million passwords from hacked accounts to assess the vulnerability of certain key phases that are used for Facebook accounts and online banking.
The report from Cyber Skills found over 12 hundred accounts used "fatherted" (Fr. Ted) as their password with a further 87 using the word "glenroe".
Dr Hazel Murray is a lecturer in cyber security at MTU and says hackers can use a person's nationality to get through to their personal information:
"If you look at the Irish set of passwords, made by Irish people, you can tell immediately because they use the names of places like counties, really predictable basically. And the problem is that an attacker will know where you're from, so if someone's trying to guess their your password, it's not hard for them to know you're from Ireland and guess something that's Irish or a current favourite TV show".
