Top Most Common Passwords That Can Be Cracked in a Second

Passwords serve as the gateway to our personal information, yet they are often overly simplistic and predictable, rendering them susceptible to cybercriminals‘ prying eyes. NordPass, a firm dedicated to the creation and safeguarding of passwords, has released its annual report highlighting the most commonly encountered passwords. This report reveals a lack of creativity among users in their password selection.

In collaboration with independent researchers, NordPass scrutinized 4.3 terabytes of data from public sources, emphasizing that personal user data remained untouched. The analysis, encompassing 35 countries and eight different platform types, indicated that the majority of passwords consist of basic numeric sequences.

The password ‘123456’ emerged as the most prevalent, recorded over 4.5 million times. NordPass notes that it can be cracked in less than a second. Similarly, ‘admin’ is easily breached and was recorded over 4 million times. Numeric sequences like ‘1234’, ‘12345678’, or ‘123456789’ follow closely in prevalence.

The list also includes terms such as ‘password’, which can be cracked in under a second, and ‘UNKNOWN’, which takes 17 minutes to breach.

‘P@ssw0rd’, despite its apparent originality, can also be hacked in less than a second and was used 135,424 times.

The most popular passwords are numeric sequences. However, swiping one’s finger across the top row of a keyboard yields ‘qwertyuiop’ — a password used 79,434 times.

NordPass also analyzes passwords by country. For instance, in the USA, ‘123456’, ‘password’, and ‘admin’ remain the most popular. The 16th most popular password, ‘sh**bird’, was used 4,230 times and takes five minutes to crack.

It is noted that different platforms influence password creation habits. For example, the fourth most popular password on e-commerce sites like Amazon is ‘amazon’.

For streaming sites, one of the most common passwords is ‘netflix’. According to NordPass, streaming sites have the least secure passwords compared to other websites.

This year’s trends don’t significantly diverge from past NordPass reports. Passwords like ‘12345’ and ‘password’ consistently rank among the most common.

NordPass asserts that as technology advances, passwords are becoming more challenging to crack, yet threats from malicious software remain pertinent. The company advises creating complex 20-character passwords, incorporating both upper and lower-case letters, avoiding easily guessable data like birth dates, and using different passwords for various platforms.