Last week, password manager Nordpass produced its annual rankings of the world’s 200 most common passwords. Big news….. “123456” has been toppled from the top spot by….. “password”. This may look bad, but it is an improvement on the previous winner of “12345”!
We all know passwords matter when it comes to online security, but in reality, 65% of us still use the same or similar passwords everywhere. Though the most-used passwords may differ from country to country, Internet users worldwide are notorious for poor password choices. So if you want to make your passwords hard to guess and harder to crack, you’ll need to avoid the most hacked passwords and create a strategy for better password security.
Millions of people are still using the most hackable passwords in the US, the UK, Australia, and other countries where English is the predominant language.
New studies show that common keyboard patterns like “1234,” “qwerty,” and “asdf” are still popular password choices among English speakers. Names – both given names and those of famous fictional characters – are another top pick. Superheroes, sports teams, cities, countries, and pet names are also frequently used as passwords.
How to avoid the most hacked passwords
Internet users worldwide should avoid keyboard patterns, names, dates, and any other password based on common words or phrases. Basically, anything found in a dictionary or popularized in the country’s culture are a no-no. Instead, the best passwords are passphrases that combine multiple words. Passphrases can be made stronger by using uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
Passphrases, even apparently obvious ones, are extremely difficult to hack. Even with the tools hackers currently have at their disposal even something as simple as “Three blind mice” is hard to crack. If you remove the spaces between the words or replace with a special character then this makes the passphrase almost impossible to crack.
However, creating and remembering a unique passphrase for every online account can quickly become a daunting task for most. To avoid the most hacked passwords and increase online security, we recommend a password manager to generate and store unique, long passwords. A password manager removes the burden of creating a different password for every login. It also stores and fills those passwords when a user returns to the website. A user can create one long passphrase as their master password for their password manager account, while the passwords manager does the rest.
Need help in developing your security strategy? Need help with choosing the right password manager and setting an organisational password blacklist? Get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to help.
You can read the full list of 200 top passwords right here on the Nordpass website.