Passwords, Insecurity in the millions
Passwords.. You’ll hear it a lot from tech people about how complex your passwords should be. And although you may think “Oh, I’m fine using simple passwords if I make it long.” – I beg to differ.
An old community I used to be a part of and help manage had quite a lot of members – over 6 million registered (although I’m sure the majority of those were spam accounts). It died near the end of 2008, I was fortunate enough to have made a backup of the accounts database on July 13th, 2008.
Yesterday, and earlier today I was sifting through some of my old backups and I ended up doing queries on the database to see the most common passwords (Before you say anything, I’m aware that these passwords are not hashed – the software we used did not support it until later sadly) . It’s kind of funny, the #1 most common of the passwords was ‘123456’ – used by 3,482 people. Passwords like that are extremely insecure and can lead to your account being broken into very easily. It’s no wonder people are always having security problems, losing access to their PayPal, bank, and other important accounts – all because the didn’t want to secure their passwords. Stupidity knows no bounds.
I’ve compiled a list of the top 100 passwords used below for your viewing, and laughing pleasure.
- 123456 – used by 3,482 people
- password – used by 1,167 people
- 12345 – used by 946 people
- 123 – used by 925 people
- 123456789 – used by 839 people
- 1234 – used by 732 people
- qwerty – used by 721 people
- lol – used by 592 people
- 123123 – used by 591 people
- killer – used by 523 people
- dragon – used by 498 people
- lol123 – used by 430 people
- abc123 – used by 393 people
- shadow – used by 385 people
- warcraft – used by 357 people
- password1 – used by 317 people
- 123321 – used by 303 people
- asdasd – used by 302 people
- master – used by 294 people
- 12345678 – used by 274 people
- lollol – used by 252 people
- monkey – used by 242 people
- daniel – used by 237 people
- pokemon – used by 237 people
- 1q2w3e4r – used by 220 people
- 123qwe – used by 210 people
- wow – used by 204 people
- 159753 – used by 201 people
- 111111 – used by 197 people
- 1234567 – used by 196 people
- STARWARS – used by 194 people
- hunter – used by 188 people
- soccer – used by 186 people
- poop – used by 185 people
- qazwsx – used by 185 people
- cheese – used by 181 people
- diablo – used by 181 people
- hejsan – used by 159 people
- 000000 – used by 158 people
- Slipknot – used by 158 people
- thomas – used by 155 people
- asd – used by 152 people
- google – used by 147 people
- qwerty123 – used by 143 people
- eminem – used by 142 people
- andrew – used by 141 people
- 666666 – used by 141 people
- 1q2w3e – used by 141 people
- samsung – used by 140 people
- 1 – used by 139 people
- hejhej – used by 138 people
- martin – used by 135 people
- asdf – used by 133 people
- superman – used by 131 people
- abcd1234 – used by 128 people
- matrix – used by 127 people
- football – used by 127 people
- metallica – used by 126 people
- 112233 – used by 126 people
- michael – used by 125 people
- alex – used by 124 people
- 654321 – used by 121 people
- logitech – used by 120 people
- hello – used by 117 people
- fuckyou – used by 117 people
- – used by 116 people (Although you can’t see it, there should be 8 spaces here – Yes, 8 spaces)
- SLAYER – used by 116 people
- 121212 – used by 115 people
- blink182 – used by 110 people
- darkness – used by 110 people
- asd123 – used by 109 people
- baseball – used by 109 people
- aaaaaa – used by 109 people
- computer – used by 109 people
- chicken – used by 108 people
- 1234qwer – used by 107 people
- 1234567890 – used by 105 people
- asdfgh – used by 104 people
- justin – used by 104 people
- 1qaz2wsx – used by 104 people
- asdf1234 – used by 103 people
- hahaha – used by 103 people
- qweasd – used by 103 people
- alexander – used by 102 people
- qwe123 – used by 102 people
- robert – used by 102 people
- naruto – used by 102 people
- hallo – used by 101 people
- parola – used by 101 people
- asshole – used by 99 people
- hej123 – used by 98 people
- warcraft1 – used by 97 people
- letmein – used by 96 people
- oliver – used by 94 people
- 1111 – used by 94 people
- matthew – used by 94 people
- element – used by 93 people
- asdfasdf – used by 92 people
- noob – used by 92 people
- brandon – used by 91 people
Please, for everyone’s sake.. choose a less common and slightly more complicated password.
Interesting, I tend to key bash when creating new passwords, and edit it as desired after. Guess it’s similar to a random password generator.
I’ve heard of a couple people using patterns for passwords, including there favorite piano tunes and such, interesting method of creating them.
I dont have passwords per say, more of patterns on the keyboard..
zawerfcx = D
2wsxdrfvgy7 = W
etc
easy to remeber and hard to hack 😀
I wouldn’t believe this if the info wasn’t right in front of my eyes 😮 The best password I ever had (and still have) was randomly generated for me 😀 I didn’t think I’d remember it but after a few goes it was cemented in my brain 🙂
Yeah, I was quite amazed myself – it’s rather sad this is the ‘norm’. :/
For my passwords I usually pick a few words and replace characters, like pickafewwords would be 9!ck4fewWord$ – this has lowercase, uppercase, numbers, signs, and is 13 characters long.