The 25 most commonly used passwords worldwide
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blog.teamsid.com/worst-passwords-of-2014:
Data from 3.3 million cracked passwords in 2014 was evaluated for the analysis.
Has much changed in the meantime? – probably not.
So it’s mainly rows of numbers, rows of letters on the keyboard, sports, animals, superheroes, swear words. The words refer to the English-speaking world. In Germany, however, things will be similar: “qwertz”, “asdfg”, “fußball”…
“Social” passwords
Not on the list but just as easy to crack are the so-called “Social” passwords. With a bit of searching on the web and a look at the Facebook website, these are also very easy to guess: Own company name, user name, e-mail address, date of birth, wedding date, child’s name…
Multiple use
If you then use the same password several times, or if the data thief has a password sent to the email account that has just been cracked using the “forgotten password” function that many websites offer, even a password in a supposedly unimportant place can cause a lot of mischief.
Why don’t Internet providers help?
Modern Internet providers make it difficult to guess passwords, for example, by limiting the number of times you can enter something incorrectly before you are blocked. But this is not the case everywhere and a hacker can bypass this relatively easily. Many companies only store passwords in encrypted form. That is a certain protection. But do you want to rely on the fact that your favorite website, of all places, is not careless with password storage? Due to the system, e-mail passwords are more difficult to protect against guessing.
Software helps with password management
To ensure that secure passwords remain easy to use and that you can use a different password for each website without getting confused, you can get help from good software, so-called“password managers“.
You then only need to remember a (hopefully good) password for the program itself and the program then automatically fills in all logins on websites with the stored access data. If you don’t want to spend money on it: Simple solutions are built into good browsers, such as Firefox.
Recommendation
The biggest enemy of your own safety is simply your own comfort. 🙂
You should use tools where you need them and they are convenient: Password managers – it’s best to try out different ones. We use 1Password, but it is in English and costs a (manageable) amount. – In addition, of course, there is regular system maintenance: updates and virus checks.
We recommend using strong passwords (longer than 16 characters that do not appear in the dictionary). And do not use passwords more than once.
See also our blog post Secure passwords.
