Do you use one of the ten most popular Internet passwords? It’s probably time to change

An awful lot of people using the Internet are very, very unimaginative.

Let's face it, Internet passwords can be a pain in the hole. Because you have to use so many for accessing all sorts of websites and services, sometimes it's easy to just use the same one over and over and make it simple enough so that you can remember it every time. Businesses, it would appear, operate on the same principle because a recent study of business' Internet passwords by Global Security company Trustwave found that the same ones keep popping up over and over again. More worryingly, you wouldn't need to be the world's greatest code-breaker to crack them either; in fact, before you look at the top ten below have a stab at guessing a few of them and see how many you got right. The study was based on a sample of just under 500,000 passwords so the numbers are certainly there to back up the findings. Let's just say that if you think that by adding a number or a couple of numbers after the actual word 'password' you're increasing your security, think again.

Top ten Internet business passwords 2014 (number of times password was used in brackets)

1. Password 1 (4,585) 2. Welcome1 (3,690) 3. P@ssword (3,120) 4. Summer1! (1,960) 5. password (1,694) 6. Fa$hion1 (1,313) 7. Hello123 (1,196) 8. Welcome123 (1,143) 9. 123456q@ (1,078) 10. P@assword1 (921) Hat-tip to i100