Put in a bit of effort folks…
It’s pretty clear from the passwords that many people are using that they simply want to be hacked and have their data stolen, why else would they use such rudimentary passwords?
By examining the accounts from a leaked Yahoo database, featuring outdated accounts from a calling service, researchers put together a list of the most commonly used passwords by the public.
The most popular password among Yahoo users was “123456”. To make matters worse, “password” was the second most used… password on the list.
“Welcome” came in third spot with “ninja” rather bizarrely coming in fourth spot. We didn’t see that one coming to be fair.
Often times, websites will prompt you to use a combination of characters including letters and numbers for your password, one handy way of making sure you don’t forget yours or that nobody else does either, is use “abc123” which was the fifth most commonly used password.
At six and seven on the list, people decided to put their numerical skills to the fore by choosing “123456789” and “12345678” as their passwords.
Rounding out the top ten were “sunshine” in eighth and “princess” (ninth) – while the final place is occupied by the equally awful “qwerty.”
Dr Jeff Yan, co-author of a paper on password guessing, said to the Mail Online: ‘Why do [some] use such obvious passwords? A main reason I think is that they’re either unaware of or don’t understand the risks of online security.’
He added: ‘Just like everybody knows what one should do when red lights are on in the road, eventually everybody will know 123456 or the like is not a good password choice.’
The top ten most commonly used passwords according to Yahoo data are:
- 123456
- password
- welcome
- ninja
- abc123
- 123456789
- 12345678
- sunshine
- princess
- qwerty
You can see how they compare to 2014’s most commonly used passwords here.
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