These passwords may win the popularity contest but lose flat out in security
Year after year, analyses show that millions of people make, to put it mildly, questionable choices when it comes to the passwords they use to protect their accounts. And fresh statistics for the year that is drawing to a close confirm that bad habits do die hard and many people willingly put themselves in the firing line of account-takeover attacks.
Drawing on an analysis of a total of 500 million passwords that were leaked in various data breaches in 2019, NordPass found that ‘12345’, ‘123456’ and ‘123456789’ reigned supreme in order of frequency. Between them, these numerical strings were used to ‘secure’ a total of 6.3 million accounts. It doesn’t get much more optimistic further down the list, however, as these three choices were followed by ‘test1’ and, the one and only, ‘password’.
Somewhat predictably, the chart is overall replete with many usual suspects among the most common passwords – think ‘asdf’, ‘qwerty’, ‘iloveyou’ and various other stalwart choices. Other supremely hackable passwords – including simple numerical strings, common names, and rows of keys – also abound. Much the same picture is painted annually by SplashData’s lists of the most-used passwords, such as last year, the year before that, and so on.
The entire list of the 200 most popular passwords is available in the linked blog post, but here’s at least the top 25. Let that sink in.
Rank
Password
1
12345
2
123456
3
123456789
4
test1
5
password
6
12345678
7
zinch
8
g_czechout
9
asdf
10
qwerty
11
1234567890
12
1234567
13
Aa123456.
14
iloveyou
15
1234
16
abc123
17
111111
18
123123
19
dubsmash
20
test
21
princess
22
qwertyuiop
23
sunshine
24
BvtTest123
25
11111
Eerily familiar?
If you recognize any of ..
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