The most common passwords in South Africa have been revealed by NordPass, the password security product of the company that sells NordVPN. In 2023, “admin” was the most commonly used password among South Africans, followed by – yup, you guessed it – “123456” as the second most commonly used.
While this may seem like a little joke or a funny confirmation of a stereotype it actually has sinister undertones. NordPass has tested the most common 20 passwords in South Africa and has given the time it requires a hacker to brute force each of them.
This is a popular technique where a hacker runs an algorithm to guess a password by making thousands if not millions of password attempts per second. The more complex a password is, how many different letters, numbers and special characters a password has, as well as different cases (upper and lower) for each character, the more difficult it is to brute force.
The top password “admin” will take a hacker less than one second to brute force. You might as well not be using a password at all. NordPass believes that admin is the top choice because users are simply too lazy to invent their own passwords and just leave the pre-set password of devices.
South Africans also tend to use weaker passwords for streaming accounts and stronger passwords for financial accounts. The problem is that a good enough hacker c ..
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