Every year, security experts and internet bloggers plead with the general public to use more secure passwords for their online accounts. Every year, the public fails to heed their advice, as this list of most common passwords of 2016 reveals. After examining over 10 million passwords that became public following security breaches throughout the year, the Keeper team discovered that an astounding 17% of internet users still use “123456” as a password. And believe it or not, that’s only the beginning of the bad news.
Here are some of the scariest things that the developers behind the Keeper app discovered:
- The most-frequently used password list isn’t changing from year to year.
- Four of the top ten most popular passwords are six characters or less.
- Email providers aren’t doing enough to stop spammers from setting up dummy accounts.
As Keeper notes, some of the responsibility falls on the user. If you still don’t know that “qwerty” and “password” are terrible passwords, you haven’t been paying attention. On the other hand, if account providers made password complexity a requirement, it wouldn’t be possible to use those passwords in the first place. Here are the top ten most popular password’s from Keeper’s analysis:
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty
- 12345678
- 111111
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- password
- 123123
- 987654321
As you can see from this list, most users would rather be able to slide their index finger across their keyboard than actually remember or keep track of a complex password that could keep them safe from cyberattacks.
You can learn more about Keeper’s research by checking out the infographic below:
