SplashData has released its annual list of worst passwords and for the fifth year in a row, ‘123456’ and ‘password’ have retained their spots at the number one and number two positions respectively. SplashData offers password management services like SplashID, TeamsID, and Gpass, and says that it has come up with the list of the top 100 worst passwords after evaluating over 5 million passwords that were leaked on the Internet. The American President’s name, ‘donald,’ took the 23rd spot, while the expected array of easily guessable passwords like ‘123456789’, ‘12345’, ‘qwerty’ and more were also on the top 10 list.
“Sorry, Mr. President, but this is not fake news – using your name or any common name as a password is a dangerous decision,” says Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData, Inc. “Hackers have great success using celebrity names, terms from pop culture and sports, and simple keyboard patterns to break into accounts online because they know so many people are using those easy-to- remember combinations.” Last year, thanks to the buzz around Star Wars: The Last Jedi, many users kept ‘Starwars’ as their password. It became the 16th worst password of 2017, rising up from its 25th position in 2015. Fortunately, users realised using ‘starwars’ is not a good choice and on this list of the worst passwords, it slipped to the 60th position.
Here are SplashData's top 25 worst passwords of 2018:
1) 123456 – Unchanged
2) password – Unchanged
3) 123456789 – Up 3
4) 12345678 – Down 1
5) 12345 – Unchanged
6) 111111 – New
7) 1234567 – Up 1
8) sunshine – New
9) qwerty – Down 5
10) iloveyou – Unchanged
11) princess – New
12) admin – Down 1
13) welcome – Down 1
14) 666666 – New
15) abc123 – Unchanged
16) football – Down 7
17) 123123 – Unchanged
18) monkey – Down 5
19) 654321 – New
20) !@#$%^&* – New
21) charlie – New
22) aa123456 – New
23) donald – New
24) password1 – New
25) qwerty123 – New