McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Change Your Password Day took place over the weekend, and in case you doubt the need to improve this most basic element of cybersecurity hygiene, even McDonald's – yes, the fast food chain – is urging people to get more creative when it comes to passwords. 

McDonald's Netherlands operations took the opportunity on Sunday to let customers know that, when it comes to choosing a password that's easy to remember, they ought not to pick the names of its products like hundreds of thousands of other people around the world. 

Drawing on data from Have I Been Pwned, McDonald's said that "bigmac" and its leetspeak variants were found more than 110,922 times in the site's compromised password corpus. Other products, like "happymeal," "mcnuggets," and the generic-but-still-applicable "frenchfries" were also common, and when special character substitutions are included they occur even more frequently.

It's not unusual ...