Every year, SplashData offers a list of the worst passwords, those least likely to protect your personal and professional data.
How do they do this? It’s simple: by recovering the passwords of nearly 5 million hacked accounts, SplashData can reveal a list of the most frequent ones each year.
With a significant increase in the number of personal data hackings in recent years on platforms used by everyone (DropBox to name just one), IT security experts are concerned and are asking the public to choose more secured passwords.
At the top for 4 years
In the list of the worst passwords of 2017, we find, in first place, for the fourth consecutive year, “123456”. About 3% of the passwords hacked and collected by SplashData in 2017 were “123456”, which represents 150,000 hits out of a possible 5 million.
Passwords associated with popular culture or sports are also frequently used, making your data accessible to hackers and extortionists. Another example is “starwars”. Indeed, even if you and only you can know that this is your favorite movie series, it would seem that you are not the only one; “starwars” is now on the list and ranks 16th.
The passwords on this list are, of course, the first to be tried by “hackers” to enter your various Web accounts in order to steal your data. It is therefore time to put an end to the popular belief that “the more common the password seems, the more unlikely it is that someone will find it”.
Some advice from our experts
In order to secure your password, we recommend to choose a sentence, use a combination of different types of characters (numbers, letters, punctuation, etc.) and combine upper and lower case. Also make sure it is longer than 12 characters.
For example, if you’re really the biggest Star Wars fan, you can try to add a little fantasy to it:
9273LUKEiAMyourFATHER$
iLOVELEIAhairdos48!
Here is the famous list of passwords to avoid:
- 123456
- Password
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 12345
- 123456789
- letmein
- 1234567
- football
- iloveyou
- admin
- welcome
- monkey
- login
- abc123
- starwars
- 123123
- dragon
- passw0rd
- master
- hello
- freedom
- whatever
- qazwsx
- trustno1