Don’t Use These Common Passwords

A common refrain in cybersecurity advice is to use strong and unique passwords for each of your accounts. You don’t want to use a password that’s easy to crack, nor do you want to use those passwords on multiple accounts, since that would put those accounts at greater risk.

While it’s important to choose a password that’s difficult to guess, it’s especially important not to pick a password that everyone else is using. That’s because these passwords will be quickly tried by either human or computer guessers, and your accounts may be quickly broken into.

Security researchers with Cybernews analyzed 15,212,645,925 passwords from publicly leaked data breaches, and found that just 2,217,015,490 were unique. That’s roughly 13 billion reused passwords—all of which were compromised. As part of their research, they put together a list of the top 10 most commonly-used passwords by people around the world:

1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. qwerty
4. password
5. 12345
6. qwerty123
7. 1q2w3e
8. 12345678
9. 111111
10. 1234567890

If any of your accounts use any of these passwords, change them immediately. But it’s not just these common passwords: Cybernews also found commonalities in how people create their passwords, choosing similar structures with important years, sports teams, curse words, internet memes, cities, dates, and even food. “Ice” was used in nearly six million passwords, for example (as in ice cream or iced tea); “Alex” was used in over seven million; and nearly 10 million passwords contained the year “2010.”

Even if you think your password is unique, it might not be, since you might be following similar password structure to millions (or billions) of others. Your passwords should be complex, incorporating uncommon words and phrases, as well as other characters and numbers. It’s okay if you can’t remember each and every one of these complex passwords: For that, you should rely on a password manager.