Are you using one of the 200 most common passwords? A recently published study reveals the most popular choices and warns that hackers will have no trouble gaining access to your account with these passwords.
According to a report published this week by password management service NordPass, the most common and easiest password to guess this year is “123456”, followed by “password”.
The most common passwords in the top 200 list take less than a second to crack, NordPass said.
The report compiled the most common passwords around the world. Those behind say they have analyzed data from 30 different countries.
The report shows that most 200 best passwords were repeated numbers, easy-to-type symbols and words like “qwerty” and pop culture references like “starwars.”
Here are the 10 best passwords in Canada:
- 123456
- the password
- 54321
- 123456789
- guest
- qwerty
- 111111
- 1234567
- 12345
- abc123
WHAT ARE THE REGIONAL DIFFERENCES?
Breaking down the data by country, there are some regional differences. For example, “guest” was a common password for Americans, while Canadians were more likely to use “123456”, with “guest” lower on the list. Another example is the word “hockey” ranked near the top of the list as a common Canadian password. “Baseball” held the same place in the United States
Similarly, in the UK people opted for ‘Liverpool’ and ‘arsenal’, while Italian residents had words like ‘ciao’ and ‘juventus’.
COMMON GENDER-BASED PASSWORDS
‘Password’ was the most common password among Canadian women, while men were more likely to use ‘123456’. Both passwords were on both lists, but in a different order.
Also at the top of the women’s list in Canada were the passwords ‘sunshine’, ‘Hudson’, ‘Shannon’ and ‘sparti52’, none of which made the top 10 for men. Those that were popular with Canadian men like “123456”, “password”, 12345″… were all common around the world.
PASSWORD THEMES NOTED IN THE REPORT
People were inspired by certain events and ceremonies and used names and symbols as passwords. For example, “Oscars” – referring to the Academy Awards – was used 62,983 times and “batman” and “euphoria” were used 2,562,776 and 53,993 times respectively, as being inspired by movies and shows.
However, the most popular categories of all time were highlighted in the report: food, swear words, fashion brands, sports, movies, artists, cars and video games. For example, “fish” was used 8,574,307 times, the word f was used 21,223,795 times, and “tiffany” was used 14,767,880 times.
Reporting for this story was paid for through the Meta-funded Afghan Journalists in Residence project.
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