2016 was a pretty big year for high-profile data breaches. However, it doesn't look like it was made particularly difficult for the hackers if you take a glance at this run down of the year's most widely used hacked passwords.
Cybersecurity firm Keeper has released a new study into the most common passwords of 2016. Be prepared for despair, disappointment, and facepalming. Their team sifted through the 10 million passwords that became public after cyber security breaches over the past year.
From their findings, they discovered the most common password was “123456,” which accounted for almost 17 percent of the hacked accounts. Yup, 17 percent. This was also the top password for 2015 and 2014. Does nobody learn?
Following that was “123456789” and the ever-so-slightly more inventive (it's not, we're trying to make you feel good) “qwerty.” In fact, all except a couple of the passwords were made up of simple patterns on the keyboard.
Two strange passwords you might have noticed are “3rjs1la7qe” and “18atcskd2w.” According to Security Researcher Graham Cluley, it’s most likely this password is created by a bot that was used to post spam. Another notable anomaly was “mynoob,” which could only be the work of humans.
Although, it’s funny to laugh at the poor choice of passwords, Keeper concluded its report by saying that the real responsibility should be with website owners. It argues that mass-breaches could be dampened if websites simply enforce password complexity policies that make it mandatory to put numbers, symbols, capitals, etc into a password.
- Here’s how the top 25 passwords of 2016 look, in order of most popular to least. If you spot yours, change it. Change it now.
- 1. 123456
- 2. 123456789
- 3. qwerty
- 4. 12345678
- 5. 111111
- 6. 1234567890
- 7. 1234567
- 8. password
- 9. 123123
- 10. 987654321
- 11. qwertyuiop
- 12. mynoob
- 13. 123321
- 14. 666666
- 15. 18atcskd2w
- 16. 7777777
- 17. 1q2w3e4r
- 18. 654321
- 19. 555555
- 20. 3rjs1la7qe
- 21. google
- 22. 1q2w3e4r5t
- 23. 123qwe
- 24. zxcvbnm
- 25. 1q2w3e
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