Usernames can be the source of a lot of giggles and fun, as many of the images featured here prove. But there's another side to choosing your digital alias that's not a laughing matter.
"Your username is your digital identity," explains Eric Henderson, Cybersecurity Expert at Lightcurve Internet, during an interview with Bored Panda. "It ties your activity across platforms and is the first half of most login credentials. Once it's out there, it's searchable and traceable — treat it like a fingerprint, not a nickname."
Pick the wrong username and you might just open yourself up to a whole lot of drama, and not always in a good way. Henderson tells Bored Panda that security researchers and attackers alike use OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) techniques to search for usernames across hundreds of platforms simultaneously.
"A single username can reveal every site you're registered on, photos, linked email addresses, and even past data breaches - all from publicly available information, no hacking required," he cautions.
And it gets worse...
The cybersecurity expert warns that it's not only badly chosen passwords that make people vulnerable to being hacked.
"If you reuse the same username or email across multiple sites, attackers only need one leaked password to try it everywhere," Henderson reveals. "Beyond that, a single email address fed into the right tools can surface every platform you're registered on, past data breaches, and linked accounts - in under a minute. That's not hypothetical, it is a standard reconnaissance technique."
We asked the expert how us mere mortals can check whether something bad has happened to us online... He suggested using a free tool called Have I Been Pwned (haveibeenpwned.com). It allows anyone to check if their email address has already appeared in a known data breach.
"Type in your email and it will show you exactly which breaches exposed your data, what was leaked, and when," explains Henderson. "If your email shows up (and for most people it does) that information is already in the hands of attackers."
So what tips does Henderson have for people choosing a new username?
The first piece of advice he gave us was not to reuse usernames across important accounts. And the next nugget might surprise you, since many people do it: Avoid personal info — no birthdays, birth years, names, or hometowns.
If you're wondering why using your name is a problem, Henderson explains that your real name creates a direct link between your identity and your online activity. This makes you easier to research, target, and impersonate. "Save the full name for professional profiles like LinkedIn where visibility is the point," he advises.
The expert also suggests Googling your own username. "If you can find yourself easily, so can someone else," he warns, adding that for "high-stakes" accounts like banking, email, or work, you should always use unique, non-obvious usernames.
On the subject of unique usernames, we did a quick search to find out the most popular usernames of all time. And number one wasn't quite what we expected...
According to global password manager NordPass, the top username wasn't a name. "With 875,562 hits, it was ยศกร, meaning 'title' in Thai," explains the site. David, Alex, Maria and Anna took the next top spots respectively, proving that people do indeed love using their names.
Our interview wouldn't be complete without asking the cybersecurity expert to share some of the strangest or funniest usernames he's come across during his career. And here's what he told us he's seen in breach data:
The username "unhackable1" was ironically found in multiple known data breaches. "The confidence was not warranted," quipped Henderson.
But wait, there's more...
