Despite a growing list of tips people can use to ensure they are not using bad passwords, it seems 2016 has been a bad year for passwords once again. SplashData put together a list of the worst passwords they came across throughout 2016. Most of these mentions will hardly be surprising to anyone, yet it goes to show consumers remain unaware of the risks associated with this type of behavior.
#6 qwerty
It may seem convenient to use the first few letters on a keyboard as a password. The term “qwerty” contains all different letters, which makes it “slightly” more difficult to guess. Then again, a brute forcing attack only has to go through 26 letters for every character in a completely text-based passphrase. Moreover, it appears a lot of people think “qwerty” is a good password, even though it is anything but secure.
#5 passw0rd (with a zero)
Adding a number to your password is the first step towards adding more security to login credentials. Replacing a letter with a number in the passphrase is clever, yet it won’t do much good if the basic setup of the password is still easy to crack. With no special characters or capitalization in the “passw0rd” combination, it won’t take criminals that long to crack it.
#4 loveme
Once again, a very bland password, even though it contains two separate words. “Love’ and “me” put together creates the illusion of making the password more difficult to guess, but it doesn’t matter all that much when brute-forcing attacks occur. Adding some punctuation and capitalization would make this password slightly more secure, even though it remains rather short. Passwords should always be 15 characters minimum.
#3 welcome
Perhaps one of the worst unimaginative ideas for a password is using the word “welcome”. No one who logs into a platform should use “welcome” as a password, as it is one of those combinations far too easy to guess. Once again, there is no capitalization, punctuation, or even digits to be found. Passwords like these leave the door wide open to criminals looking to hack into someone’s account with relative ease.
#2 abc123
Some computer users prefer to have their passwords easy to remember. While that is only understandable, there is no reason to make it trivial to guess. abc123 Is by far one of the worst possible combinations people can come up with it comes to generating a password. In fact, it is one of those combinations a three-year-old would try. Password security is not overly difficult, and passwords like these should be avoided at all costs.
#1 123456
Sequential numbers are one of the first combination criminals will test when obtaining someone’s login credentials. Together with “qwerty”, “password:, and “admin”, 123456 is the worst combination to use in this day and age. What is even more disconcerting is how people reuse this lackluster password for multiple services, putting their entire online identity at risk of being compromised by entering sequential numbers in the password field. To keep your online accounts secure, make sure to check out our tips to generate a secure password.
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