Do you have a safe password, or are your accounts open season for hackers? The list of 2015’s worst passwords will help you to find out.
Password management firm SplashData has just released their list of the Worst Passwords of 2015 and found that repeat offenders like “123456” and “password” are still top of the list. The data, which was compiled from 2 million leaked passwords over the course of the year, also showed simple patterns like “qwerty” and “abc123” are popular, with both finding their way into the top 15.
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“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,” explains CEO of SplashData Morgan Slain.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly given the release of JJ Abrams’ much-anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens; a number of pop culture-themed codes have also made their way onto this year’s list including “princess,” “solo,” and “star wars.”
“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.”
SpalshData does offer a few helpful tips to create a solid password, however. Make sure it’s at least 12 characters long, try to avoid using the same password for everything, and use a password manager to generate random passwords and automatically log into websites.
The data was largely compiled from North American and Western Europe.
Top 25 worst passwords of 2015:
- 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
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