Anyone with a digital password needs to listen up: SplashData has revealed the most popular passwords. While “most popular” is usually a coveted title, it is far from the case when it comes to passwords. Having a common password means you are more at risk of getting hacked.
The toppers this year are unchanged with “123456” at number one and “password” at number two, followed by “12345678,” “qwerty,” and “12345.” Interestingly enough, there are sci-fi pop culture passwords in the top 25 list, as “starwars” and “solo” made the list -- the latter presumably is a reference to Han Solo.
“We have seen an effort by many people to be more secure by adding characters to passwords, but if these longer passwords are based on simple patterns they will put you in just as much risk of having your identity stolen by hackers,” said Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData, in a statement via SplashData’s blog TeamsID. “As we see on the list, using common sports and pop culture terms is also a bad idea. We hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will take steps to strengthen their passwords and, most importantly, use different passwords for different websites.”
Below is the complete list of the top 25 most common passwords:
1. 123456 (Unchanged)
2. password (Unchanged)
3. 12345678 (Up 1)
4. qwerty (Up 1)
5 . 12345 (Down 2)
6. 123456789 (Unchanged)
7. football (Up 3)
8. 1234 (Down 1)
9. 1234567 (Up 2)
10. baseball (Down 2)
11. welcome (New)
12. 1234567890 (New)
13. abc123 (Up 1)
14. 111111 (Up 1)
15. 1qaz2wsx (New)
16. dragon (Down 7)
17. master (Up 2)
18 . monkey (Down 6)
1 9. letmein (Down 6)
20. login (New)
21. princess (New)
22. qwertyuiop (New)
23. solo (New)
24. passw0rd (New)
25. starwars (New)
How can you protect yourself? The experts at SplashData recommend creating a password with 12 characters and mixed character types and avoiding using the same password at different websites. SplashData also has a password manager, called SplashID, which can organize and protect passwords by generating random ones.
