Can you guess some of the world’s most popular passwords? Especially the ones that are the easiest to crack? A new cybersecurity report reveals a trend of user negligence towards setting strong passwords, preferring simple and common sequences for keywords. According to the research that analysed over 2 billion accounts exposed on data breach forums, the top spot continues to be held by easily guessable passwords, posing a massive security risk globally.
The report highlights that a primary reason behind compromised accounts remains basic human laziness. The sequence ‘123456’ was the most common, used by over 76 lakh (7.6 million) people. Other common choices leading the breach list included predictable strings like ‘admin,’ ‘password,’ ‘123,’ ‘1234567890,’ and ‘Aa123456.’
The study also shed light on regional vulnerabilities, specifically citing the password ‘India@123’ as a major concern. This simple password ranked 53rd on the overall list of 100 most common passwords, showing a poor security practice among a significant number of Indian users.
Most commonly used passwords leaked
The continuous popularity of such weak passwords makes “guessing as easy as ABC and 123” for cyber attackers. This reliance on poor security measures can have devastating consequences, as seen in recent high-profile breaches. In a separate incident, the core security system of the Louvre Museum in France was recently discovered to be protected by the easily guessed password “LOUVRE,” a vulnerability flagged during an investigation into a major heist.
What should you do to stay safe online
To combat this widespread vulnerability, security experts mention simple yet crucial advice for creating strong passwords:
– Passwords should be a minimum of 12 characters long.
– Use a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
– Never use personal information such as the names of family members, pets, products, or fictional characters.
Most online services often recommend going for complex passwords with more special characters and alphanumeric combinations to make it tricky for hackers to crack a password. Additionally, it is always recommended to activate a two-factor authentication (2FA) process for logging in to your favourite apps and services securely, thus eliminating the threat from a leaked password.
