Don’t give your passwords to Spaceballs! Don't let yours be 12345

Watch the video clip first. We’ll give you a second…

Hopefully you recognized the clip coming from the Mel Brooks 1987 sci-fi comedy Spaceballs. As a bit of background for those who have not seen the movie or just need a reminder: Planet Spaceball, lead by the evil President Skroob (Brooks) is running out of air. To fix this they have decided to steal the air from Planet Druidia led by King Roland (Dick Van Patten). Skroob sends his henchman Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) to kidnap Roland’s daughter Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) and to use her as leverage to get the combination to the air shield.

As you saw in the clip Dark Helmet was successful and forced Roland to give him the combination. It was 12345. Why is this funny? Is it because it is the same combination Skroob puts on his luggage? Is it because Dark Helmet mentions that it is a combination an idiot would use (no commentary here about Skroob or his luggage)? Is it because even in 1987 this was a bad password? Yes, yes, and definitely yes!

Let’s face it, we have so many logins to sites nowadays that it is hard to keep track of them. A log in for our email, for Facebook, for Twitter, for Amazon. You get the picture. We use the same log in or just pick something simple that we will remember. This is not a good idea even if we all do it. In 2012 LinkedIn was the victim of a data breach and the credentials of its users were stolen. Guess what the three most common passwords were? Password, Linkedin and 12345678. Because of this the thieves have been able to gain access to other accounts figuring that their victims haven’t changed their password, and they’ve been successful.

So, let’s help out King Roland, since Lone Starr (Bill Pullman) and Barf (John Candy) were able to stop the Spaceballs and put an end to their nefarious scheme. First, the password should be at least 8 characters, the more the better. Roland calls Druidia home so we’ll start with that since that part will be easy for him to remember. A good password has a mix of capital and lowercase letters and numbers so Druidia will become Dru1d1@. Now we need some extra characters to lengthen it. Spaceballs came out in 1987 so 19Dru1d1@87 will work. And we’ll make it easier for Roland to remember it, the password becoming 19Dru1d1@R0L&87. Now he will just have to keep his daughter away from Dark Helmet!

If you need help generating a good password try a site like this for help. A password manager can store the passwords on your computer and you can always write them down on a piece of paper and store them at home. No hacker can get that piece of paper no matter how hard they try.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top