Research finds mostly commonly used password that can be hacked in a second
Topics: News, Technology
Shola Lee
Featured Image Credit: calado / Sergiy Tryapitsyn / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: News, Technology
If this is your password, change it immediately because it can be guessed in a second — we're being serious.
Look, not all of us are tech-savvy and that's okay, but when we live most of our lives online, you need to have a decent password to protect your data at the very least.
Still, not even mass tech hacks were enough to make people rethink their easy password choices, as researchers recently found.
The research was conducted by NordPass, a password manager that creates safe codes for the technologically challenged and remembers them so you don't have to. Think of it like the 'Keychain' feature that Apple offers, except you pay for this one.
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Revealing their findings for data compiled last year, the researchers teased: "It’s that time of the year again when we get to see whether people are using the same weak passwords. Here are the top 200 most common passwords according to the 2021 research."
And, to be honest, we reckon you'd easily be able to guess the top 10 on that list because they are overwhelmingly simplistic.
So, without further adieu, here's the list of most common passwords:
As you can see from the table, the most common password is '123456', which takes one second to crack.
If that wasn't bad enough, the researchers also put into context how likely you were to suffer a data hack based on the country you were in, with Russia experiencing the most hacks per capita with a total of 2,867,917,611 across the country.
The top 10 list of passwords also varies slightly depending on the region.
For most countries '123456' holds the top spot, but hilariously in the UK the third most used password is 'liverpool' and in the eighth spot it was 'liverpool1'. This should act as a warning sign for football fans everywhere, as using your favourite team as your password can seemingly have dire consequences.
Rather predictably, 'arsenal' was still behind Liverpool, taking the 10th spot on the UK's password list.
If at this point you're wondering how exactly the researchers compiled their data, they partnered with independent specialists from the cybersecurity sector to evaluate the 4TB database, which is a record of passwords that collects data from 50 different countries.
So, we're hoping if you have any of the passwords mentioned you change them immediately.
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