The word password dethroned “123456” as the most used password in the world, while “123456789” was in third place. It would take an attacker only a second to decipher any of the three that head this ranking that the NordPass company prepares every year.
The top ten is completed with “guest”, “qwerty”, “12345678”, “111111”, “12345”, “col123456”, and “123123”. as long as “u2”, “pink” Y “prince” are the most used passwords that take names of artists; Y “matrix” and “starwars”which they do with movie names.
The listing shows the 200 most common passwords in the world, and arises from the analysis of a 3TB database that contains those that were exposed in security incidents. The information was collected thanks to the collaboration of independent investigators specialized in incident investigation.
The table is ordered according to the number of times the same key was used, including the number of times it was present in the database, and the time it would take to crack it through a brute force attack.
This year, unlike what had been happening, “123456” was dethroned by “password”.
In addition, a classification of the most popular passwords was presented in categories such as sports, names of artists or musical groups, food, video games, movies or cars, among others.
“What this shows is a pattern that people often follow when choosing a password so they are easy to remember. However, this makes them easy to predict. Especially in automated brute force attacks in which cybercriminals use software to try multiple combinations of email addresses and passwords in seconds,” said Camilo Gutiérrez Amaya, head of the ESET Latin America Research Laboratory.
In the list of passwords with names of artists also appear: “queen”, “eminen” and “metallica”. While in the movie names are “spiderman”, “joker” and “terminator”.
“The results show that it is still essential to make people aware of the importance of creating passwords that are long, hard to predict, and unique to each account or online service,” the specialist said.
In addition, he recommended that “people should know that all this can be done using a computer or phone password manager, since these services contemplate all these needs”.
“Finally, we remember the importance of activating the two step authentication in all the services they use so that the security of their accounts does not depend solely on the password”.
