25 Worst passwords in 2015

SplashData passwords list

It’s the new year again, and that means having a fresh list of worst passwords nominated in 2015, thanks to SplashData, provider of password management applications including SplashID for consumers that I reviewed long ago and TeamsID for businesses.

As always, “123456” is still the sole winner for a long while and “password” goes second (either people use the word “password” themselves or just being lazy to change the default password from device manufacturers).

This time though, we have more variant such as “1234567890” which probably makes it somewhat better than “123” or “123456”, but it’s still bad.

Thanks to Star Wars: The Force Awaken movie, we also see new Star Wars-themed passwords in the list such as “starwars”, “solo” and “princess”. And I was expecting some more creativity here, but clearly I was wrong.

According to Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData:

“We hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will take steps to strengthen their passwords and, most importantly, use different passwords for different websites.”

Here are SplashData’s “25 Worst Passwords of 2015”:

Rank

Password

Change from 2014

1

123456

Unchanged

2

password

Unchanged

3

12345678

Up 1

4

qwerty

Up 1

5

12345

Down 2

6

123456789

Unchanged

7

football

Up 3

8

1234

Down 1

9

1234567

Up 2

10

baseball

Down 2

11

welcome

New

12

1234567890

New

13

abc123

Up 1

14

111111

Up 1

15

1qaz2wsx

New

16

dragon

Down 7

17

master

Up 2

18

monkey

Down 6

19

letmein

Down 6

20

login

New

21

princess

New

22

qwertyuiop

New

23

solo

New

24

passw0rd

New

25

starwars

New

If your password is in there, you are in big trouble but it’s never too late to change (i.e NOW). These common, weak passwords are most likely to be the ones that hackers will try to get into first.

Use a password manager to handle your passwords, especially to login to those sites that you don’t visit often. As for the rest, you put more strengths to your passwords by adding patterns, digits, and special characters (ideally, they are not from your birth date or something similar that anyone can easily guess).

The complete infographic from SplashData is here (click the image for a bigger picture):

worst passwords 2015

If you are looking for a good password manager (you should use one), Reviews.com has a good article with comparisons between the best password managers out there.

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