Prefer to watch than read? Watch a video version of this post:

You might have seen this brilliant piece of viral marketing from cybersecurity firm Hive Systems, that seems to pop up every year in my social media feeds:

While it's a great piece of content marketing, the color choices leave a few things to be desired, IMHO:

When choosing colors, you want to put some thought into what the colors should mean to the reader. In this scenario, there are probably three levels of password vulnerability that readers should care about:

Vulnerable to batch attack: A password that could be cracked if it were in a batch of many leaked passwords, i.e., that could be cracked in a few hours or less.
Vulnerable to targeted attack: A password that could be cracked by a determined hacker who was targeting the reader individually, and who could wait up to a few months.
Secure: A password that would take more than a few months to crack, i.e., longer than even a determined hacker would be willing to wait (and the reader would probably change their password within that time anyway to protect something that would warrant such an elaborate attack).

With this in mind, let's assign colors based on these categories to make these values more meaningful to readers:

It would be interesting to test this redesign to see if it generates more or less engagement from readers, but what I can say with some confidence is that it's more meaningful than the original.