NordPass, the parent company of NordVPN, and a group of independent researchers have released a list of the most commonly used passwords.
While it can be tedious to try and come up with unique passwords for every website, the convenience of falling back on commonly used passwords could cost you. Criminals are constantly attempting to crack accounts and a commonly used password can take just seconds to crack in many cases.
This gets significantly worse when you choose a lazy password — the kind you’d see as a joke on a TV show. The study conducted by NordPass showed that these lazy passwords were the most commonly used (and cracked) passwords.
Here is the list of the most commonly used passwords, plus how long it takes hackers to crack them (on average).
A few notes from the study include:
- 123456 has ranked as the most common password for five years.
- 123456 and UNKNOWN are the two most common passwords for financial accounts, smartphones, and social media accounts.
- “Isabella” is the second most used passwords in Austria.
- Chinese users are the most likely to use a string of numbers, such as 123456, as many Chinese users don’t include letters in their passwords.
- American users included slang words as their passwords more than any other country.
- “Admin” has not appeared in the top 200 list in the past five years, however, this year it’s nearly topped the charts at #2.
If you’re using any of these passwords, you should immediately change your passwords and consider using a password manager and checking for any possible data breaches on your accounts.
You should also take advantage of biometric logins, like fingerprint sensors and face-scans, on any app that allows it.