Why You Should Take Your Passwords Seriously

Do you know why you should take your passwords seriously? Many of us are still utterly poor at coming up with strong passwords, according to a slew of recent studies.

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This includes a brand-new report from password manager NordpassNordpass, which studied a database of over 3TB of compromised passwords. Spanning users from 30 countries, to identify the top 200 passwords. And ranking entries by the number of occurrences discovered, the difficulty of their cracking, as well as popularity by nation and, where possible, gender.

Unsurprisingly, Nordpass discovered that “password” continues to be the most popular option, with “12345” coming in second place globally.

 

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Why you should take your passwords seriously: trends in weak passwords

The remaining items on the list are mostly other combinations of letters and numbers that weren’t exactly thrown together at random. With “quertyuiop” (the top letter row on most English-language keyboards) coming in at number 36 internationally.

Direct comparisons of the Nordpass data reveal that neither gender is more concerned about security than the other. Instead, each gender makes poor decisions in a distinctive way.

According to a comparison of the top ten passwords in the UK men were more likely to choose the names of football teams. “liverpool,” “arsenal,” and “chelsea” are ranked fifth, sixth, and eighth among them, respectively). Whereas women preferred names (“charlie,” ranked third). As well as locations (“london,” ranked seventh), or other unusual nouns (“chocolate” and “monkey,” ranked eighth and ninth,” respectively).

The ongoing FIFA World Cup is having an effect on password choices. This is according to a separate study by password management company Specops Software that examined over 800 million compromised passwords. Users are choosing the names of international teams, former and current players, and other pertinent but widely used terms.

For instance, “USA” occurred over 1.3 million times as a password. While “kane,” the name of England player Harry Kane, appeared over 133,000 times. And even the word “soccer” itself appeared over 140,000 times.

In light of Nordpass’ gender distribution, Specops’ data may potentially provide insight into the password decisions made primarily by male users.

9to5Google discovered that some consumers have even started using their phone’s manufacturer as their password.

The 78th most popular password in the world right now is “samsung,” and the 145th most popular is “googledummy,” which is problematic for the vast majority of users who are devoted to the greatest Android, Samsung, and iPhone devices available.