SplashData is back with another year-in review of what they saw as the worst passwords to be used in the year. The list is comprised of data gathered through public data leaks, and it shows the most popular passwords used throughout all of them.
Sure enough, most people are lazy or just don’t care, with generic combinations of letters and numbers making up most of the list. You have your usual “123456” and “abc123” entries on the list, and that ever-popular “password” password sits firmly at #2.
2015’s list did see a couple of interesting new entries, though. One such password was “starwars,” which debuts at #25. It’s likely many folks were so excited about the arrival of the 7th feature length film in the series that they wanted to make sure anything and everything around them reflected it. We even see “solo” sitting at #23, which may or may not refer to the character Han Solo featured prominently throughout the film.
As always, we’re posting this as a nice reminder to make sure you’re using good passwords. No one’s expecting you to use government-grade passwords that not even a genius can remember, but at least try and refrain from using generic combinations of letters and numbers, or plain language words.
Try to replace some of those letters with numbers, and use symbols here and there. Use something that has a good variety of upper and lower case letters. Make it a personal rule to make 8 characters your absolute minimum. Do all this and it’s likely that your accounts won’t be compromised due to simple, educated guesses. The full list is straight ahead.
2015’s Worst Passwords
- 123456
- password
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 12345
- 123456789
- football
- 1234
- 1234567
- baseball
- welcome
- 1234567890
- abc123
- 111111
- 1qaz2wsx
- dragon
- master
- monkey
- letmein
- login
- princess
- qwertyuiop
- solo
- passw0rd
- starwars
[via Wall Street Journal]
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