As they’re enough data breaches this year, security researchers around the world have grouped all the leaked passwords data from these breaches and shared it with NordPass to compile the Worst Passwords of 2019 List. The data set contained about 500 million passwords, says NordPass. And it has reviewed it through to rank the top 200 worst passwords of this year.

As expected, the sequential numbers 12345 remained the top of the list with more than 2.8 million people setting it as their password. Further, adding an extra digit 6 and making it 123456 as the password is the choice of 24+ million people, followed by 10+ million people setting 123456789 as a password. The list consisted of passwords of personal names, foods, sports and recognizable keyboard patterns as qwerty or asdfgh.

RANK PASSWORD 1 12345 2 123456 3 123456789 4 test1 5 password 6 12345678 7 zinch 8 g_czechout 9 asdf 10 qwerty 11 1234567890 12 1234567 13 Aa123456. 14 iloveyou 15 1234 16 abc123 17 111111 18 123123 19 dubsmash 20 test 21 princess 22 qwertyuiop 23 sunshine 24 BvtTest123 25 11111

No Change! Why?

Even after years of awareness on hacks, people still do set such easy passwords and ignore strengthening them as asked. Why? Simple, they’re easy to be remembered.

Though many would set somewhat hard passwords on important accounts as net banking things, they do act carefree on social accounts. Though they don’t seem important as bank accounts, social profiles do give adequate insights into one’s life, letting the hacker have a brief idea before cracking the victim’s password.

Password managers as 1Password or NordPass let users store their passwords securely across many accounts. But the catch here is that the user has to pay (or to subscribe for any other plans as NordVPN) to avail of this service, which sways away many.

People mostly try to choose passwords that are easy to remember. This could be their names, simple numbers formats, identifiable patterns on the keyboard, etc. All these can be easily cracked by hackers just by a guess, without even using any algorithms to hard crack. Worst of all many would use those simply chosen passwords across many other online accounts, which let hackers breach into other accounts of the victim as well.

Source: NordPass Blog