If you’re like most of us, you’re overwhelmed by the myriad of passwords you have to maintain, for emails, online shopping, streaming, financial institutions….. So like many of us, you resort to something that is easy to remember even though hopefully by now, you know that’s not the best idea.
Just how easy are American’s making their passwords. Cybersecurity firm NordPass recently examined data culled from online security incidents in 30 countries to determine how often certain easy-to-guess passwords are used. They found 83% of the passwords in this year’s top 200 list can be cracked in less than a second.
The top 50 found in the United States are below, all of which violate the cardinal rules of strong password protection like making them long, nonsensical, and alphanumeric.
If any of these look familiar, change yours. (Which you should do often anyway.)
- guest
- 123456
- password
- 12345
- a1b2c3
- 123456789
- Password1
- 1234
- abc123
- 12345678
- qwerty
- baseball
- football
- unknown
- soccer
- jordan23
- iloveyou
- monkey
- shadow
- g_czechout
- 1234567
- 1q2w3e4r
- 111111
- f-ckyou
- princess
- basketball
- sunshine
- jordan
- michael
- 1234567890
- reset
- zinch
- maiden
- 123123
- 81729373759
- superman
- hunter
- anthony
- maggie
- super123
- purple
- love
- ashley
- andrew
- justin
- killer
- pepper
- tigger
- buster
- Nicole
American’s have a penchant for sports related passwords. Beyond these on the list, sports teams were also popular. Americans also lean on fashion brands (Tiffany, Nike, Gap), TV show names, and food (pizza, popcorn, potato) to build their passwords.
If a password has words that help you remember it, then it will be pretty easy for a hacker to break.