25 Worst passwords in 2015

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):

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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