At a time when cyber attacks are ever more common, with personal data becoming a commodity, you might imagine that people would have learned their lessons at the expense of nude photo hackings and Ashley Madison data dumping. But as this list of 2015’s most popular passwords goes to show, most of us still like the convenience of something incredibly easy to remember – and even easier to guess.
SplashData’s annual list of the millions of stolen passwords that have been published online throughout the last 12 months accounts for the most commonly used, ranking them in order of popularity. 2015’s selection, comprising more than 2m leaked passwords, reveals a rather cavalier attitude to online security, reading like an advice column of how not to do it.
Perennial password favourites 123456 and password remain the top two, but 2015 was a year for sports fans to reconsider the wisdom of using football and baseball. Soccer and golfer also appeared in the top 100. The popularity of Star Wars making a welcome return to the big screen also saw starwars and solo entering the top 25 for the first time.
Take a look at the list below and if any of these happen to be your password, you might want to hastily throw in some pieces of punctuation into the mix:
- 123456(Unchanged)
- password(Unchanged)
- 12345678(Up 1)
- qwerty(Up 1)
- 12345(Down 2)
- 123456789(Unchanged)
- football(Up 3)
- 1234(Down 1)
- 1234567(Up 2)
- baseball(Down 2)
- welcome(New)
- 1234567890(New)
- abc123(Up 1)
- 111111(Up 1)
- 1qaz2wsx(New)
- dragon(Down 7)
- master(Up 2)
- monkey(Down 6)
- letmein(Down 6)
- login(New)
- princess(New)
- qwertyuiop(New)
- solo(New)
- passw0rd(New)
- starwars(New)
