For consumers, passwords are a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until the internet and the rise of online commerce and security that we’ve been tasked with remembering dozens of access codes to financial institutions, email accounts, streaming services, and retailers.

For too many people, that arduous task is resolved by choosing an easy password. How easy? Cybersecurity firm NordPass recently examined data culled from online security incidents in 30 countries to determine how often certain easy-to-guess passwords are used.

The top 50 found in the United States are below, all of which violate the cardinal rules of strong password protection like making them long, nonsensical, and alphanumeric. If any of these look familiar, change yours. (Which you should do often anyway.)

  1. guest
  2. 123456
  3. password
  4. 12345
  5. a1b2c3
  6. 123456789
  7. Password1
  8. 1234
  9. abc123
  10. 12345678
  11. qwerty
  12. baseball
  13. football
  14. unknown
  15. soccer
  16. jordan23
  17. iloveyou
  18. monkey
  19. shadow
  20. g_czechout
  21. 1234567
  22. 1q2w3e4r
  23. 111111
  24. f-ckyou
  25. princess
  26. basketball
  27. sunshine
  28. jordan
  29. michael
  30. 1234567890
  31. reset
  32. zinch
  33. maiden
  34. 123123
  35. 81729373759
  36. superman
  37. hunter
  38. anthony
  39. maggie
  40. super123
  41. purple
  42. love
  43. ashley
  44. andrew
  45. justin
  46. killer
  47. pepper
  48. tigger
  49. buster
  50. nicole

Across all countries, password was the most common, with nearly 5 million accounts making the bare minimum effort.

NordPass also found that people rely heavily on fashion brands (Tiffany, Nike, Gap), sports teams, TV show names, and food (pizza, popcorn, potato) to build their passwords. Generally speaking, if a password has words that help you remember, it will probably help a hacker, too.

[h/t NordPass]

Jake Rossen

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