Passwords are something that we use every day, whether that is to unlock our mobile phones, log onto our computers at work, take out some cash at the bank or to access our beloved social media accounts. There’s no mistake, we can’t avoid them if we tried, so why do so many of us set such weak and guessable passwords?
Furthermore, we have been given plenty of warning to set strong, unique and private passwords that are difficult for potential hackers to guess yet, despite this, people continue to use passwords that are far too predictable to secure their online presence.
In 2016, passwords are still taking the form of patterns such as a sequence of numbers or letters in plain sight, such as “123456” and “qwerty“. You only have to look at the computer keyword to see them, hiding in plain sight.
According to the latest compilation of the most common passwords, it is “123456” that comes out on top.
That’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage. Here’s a clip to prove it.
The author of the list, Keeper – a password manager, suggests that 50% of people use at least one of the passwords that appear in the top 25. Furthermore, 17% of people, that’s nearly one in every five, use the top password, “123456” as their password for something.
Keeper composed the list by analysing more than 10 million passwords that had been leaked in a data breach during the last 12 months. Also featuring in the top 25 are “google” and “password”. This year’s list is much more worrying to cyber security experts compared to last year’s list. That list showed that the most common passwords in 2015 were words such as “football”, “starwars” and “monkey”.
With so many high-profile data breaches happening in the last couple of years, Keeper is calling on websites to be more responsible in cracking down on allowing users to set easy to guess patterns as passwords. It has also warned that hackers are using password cracking software that can guess codes of up to six characters long in a matter of seconds, especially if they are using sequential letters and numbers.
Keeper’s top 25 most common passwords are:
1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. qwerty
4. 12345678
5. 111111
6. 1234567890
7. 1234567
8. password
9. 123123
10. 987654321
11. qwertyuiop
12. mynoob
13. 123321
14. 666666
15. 18atcskd2w
16. 7777777
17. 1q2w3e4r
18. 654321
19. 555555
20. 3rjs1la7qe
21. google
22. 1q2w3e4r5t
23. 123qwe
24. zxcvbnm
25. 1q2w3e
Anyone who is using one of these passwords to secure something important to them may seriously want to consider changing them before someone finds out and makes your life much more difficult. Set a password that is hard for someone to remember and one that is difficult to predict. Try to use something that combines numbers, letters and characters. You may also want to switch between upper and lower case letters to be on the safe side. Something like “Y3ll0wSubm4r1n3?!?” is a much stronger password that “qwerty” or “123456” and is more likely to keep your online data safe.
Though don’t use that exact password, that’s the one I use for my bank… just kidding.
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[…] your password is one of the 50 most popular of 2016, it would probably not take very long at all to guess it because these are among the first that […]