25 Worst Passwords of 2015 Are Released

Do you use any of them?

Passwords are used to protect your identity everywhere you go. From Facebook to email and banking, practically every website you visit asks you to create an account with a password. Some ask for your password to include a certain number of special characters, letters, numbers, and uppercase letters, others let you decide on your own how safe you want to be.

Whether you use the same password for every account you create or choose as random a collection of characters as you can think of every time, here are some passwords that you should not be using:

1. 123456
2. password
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. 12345
6. 123456789
7. football
8. 1234
9. 1234567
10. baseball
11. welcome
12. 1234567890
13. abc123
14. 111111
15. 1qaz2wsx
16. dragon
17. master
18. monkey
19. letmein
20. login
21. princess
22. qwertyuiop
23. solo
24. passw0rd

25. starwars

This list of passwords comes from a password management company called SplashData that releases a list of the 25 most commonly used passwords every year. If the passwords that you use are among them, it means that they are not secure enough and that you should strongly consider changing them.

As you can see, many of them like “qwerty” and “1qaz2wsx” stem from the layout of a keyboard. Others like “starwars,” “solo” and “princess” are more pop culture related and tend to change from year to year.

You might wonder how SplashData gets access to people’s passwords to create their list — websites aren’t supposed to share them after all. They explain their methods on their Q&A page: “these are the most common 25 passwords we found from our searches of public posts or “dumps” of plain text (rather than hashed or encrypted) passwords posted on a wide variety of sites on the Internet during the calendar year 2015.”

Their list of 25 is compiled from over two million passwords and come from “hacks, breaches, or leaks of password databases on servers supporting consumer web sites.” They calculate that about 3 percent of people use these passwords and release them to “encourage people to use longer, stronger, more complex passwords.”

Moving forward, they make 3 recommendations for choosing a password:

1. Use longer passwords with 12 or more characters, including different types

2. Don’t use the same password on every site you visit

3. Use a password manager to generate and organize random passwords

And remember, a stronger password means you are less likely to be a victim of identity theft!