A recent survey by the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) in the UK has shown that millions of internet users – as many as 23.2 million users – use “123456” as their account passwords. According to the agency’s findings, this password is also the password that is used most frequently in the violated accounts. After this was the password “123456789”, which was used by almost 7.7 million users.
Unlike the two above-mentioned passwords, internet users also often used “qwerty”, “password” and “1111111” as their passwords.
In terms of the names of the fictional characters used as passwords, “superman” was at the top of the list, closely followed by “naruto,” “tigger,” “pokemon,” and “batman.” Popular names from the Premier League football team that were used as passwords include ‘liverpool’, ‘chelsea’, ‘arsenal’, ‘manutd’ and ‘everton’. “Using hard-to-guess passwords is a strong first step and we recommend combining three random but memorable words: be creative and use words that are memorable to you so people can’t guess your password,” says Dr. Ian Levy, technical director of NCSC, in a statement.
In addition to publishing the report describing that the password “123456” was found 23 million times in different data breaches, NCSC also published a list of top 100,000 passwords from the Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned database. We have compiled a list of the 20 most vulnerable passwords in the list. Check if you use one of these passwords here:
– 123456
– 123456789
– Qwerty
– Password
– 111111
– 12345678
– abc123
– 1234567
– password1
– 12345
– 1234567890
– 123123
– 000000
– Iloveyou
– 1234
– 1q2w3e4r5t
– Qwertyuiop
– 123
– Monkey
– Dragon
If you are using one of the above mentioned passwords, change it now and replace it with a password that is a combination of words, special characters, and numbers. Also, avoid using the same password on multiple accounts to make your accounts more secure.