Time to Change Your Password for 2013? Top 25 Most Commonly Used Passwords
SplashData’s annual “25 Worst Passwords of the Year” list was released this fall, but it serves as a good reminder to change your passwords for the new year. If any of your passwords are on this list, then you should go change them right now! Security experts say that you should always have different passwords for each site, but few people do. SplashData’s top 25 list was compiled from files containing millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers.
Top 25 Passwords of 2012 in order from most used to least:
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- abc123
- qwerty
- monkey
- letmein
- dragon
- 111111
- baseball
- iloveyou
- trustno1
- 1234567
- sunshine
- master
- 123123
- welcome
- shadow
- ashley
- football
- jesus
- michael
- ninja
- mustang
- password1
The top three passwords, “password,” “123456,” and “12345678,” remain unchanged from last year’s list. If you have any one of these as your password, consider changing it to something stronger. A good way to strengthen your current password would be to substitute letters for numbers or symbols. For example, “snowday” would be stronger as “$n0wDay!” Underscores, dashes, hyphens, and other punctuation marks are your friend!
“We’re hoping that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites,” said SplashData CEO Morgan Slain.
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