Your name, favorite football team and favorite band: the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center has released a list of the 100,000 most common passwords in data violations to encourage users to select strong passwords.
Hundreds of millions of internet users still risk having their accounts hacked by using unbelievably simple and widely used passwords that cyber criminals can easily guess-or worse, just plucked out from stolen information databases.
An analysis of the 100,000 most common passwords that have been published with data breaches and hacker campaigns reveals that vast numbers of people still do not understand the importance–or how to create –of having a strong password with names, sports teams, bands and even keys closely on the keyboard to ensure accounts.
Passwords were collected using information from global data violations that have been leaked, shared or sold on the dark web by hackers already in the public domain.
The complete list of the GCHQ information service was created and shared by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, with the aim of promoting users to create strong passwords to protect sensitive data.
Far from it,’ 123456′ is the most common password in data breaches. This password contains 23.2 million accounts–made up of the first six numerical keys across the top of a keyboard; 7.7 million users took the whole slip and used almost all number keys, choosing’ 123456789′ as their password. More than 3 million users who have fallen data infringements use the remaining five most commonly used passwords–’ qwerty’ appears 3.8m-times,’ password’ appears 3.6m-fold and’ 111111′ appears 3.1m-fold. Many of the top 50 passwords most used–almost all used by more than half a million people–are based on basic ideas like a simple number series, and six or seven times the same number.
The’ iloveyou,” monkey’ and’ dragon’ passwords rank 26th on the list of 735.980 users who select it for their password–you probably have chosen to use it as your password for MySpace although many have forgotten their account on the social network for a long time.
Names are a common password, with a password for hundreds of thousands of users. More than 400,000 users each use’ ashley’ and’ michael,’ each of which is over 300,000 times used by’ daniel,” jessica’ and’ charlie.’
It is likely that these are the names of the users themselves, which means that if a hacker has an email address and no password, cracking it using the first name of the victim might open things up.
Bands are also a common subject for users who select simple passwords with a password list that details how 285,706 users chose’ blink182′ as their password, thus making the pop-punk band the most frequently used password related to music.
Each of them is used more than 140,000 times by’ 50cent,” enimem,” metallica,’ and’ slipknot.’ Sports teams are another common topic among the most frequently violated passwords. Liverpool is the most widely used Premier League football team, with 280,723 users choosing to lock up their account.
The remaining five Premier League soccer teams in the top five are “chelsea,” “arsenal,” “manutd” and “everton.”
Those who use their favorite sports team as their password may simply become the victim of a hack–many sports fans talk about their favorite team on social media, so it may be relatively easy for a cyber criminal to search for this information on Twitter or Facebook and use the information to crack the account.
