365 days later,’123456′ continues to be the queen of passwords. A new twist that once again demonstrates the low security of user credentials across the planet. In 2020, this password has been exposed a total of 24 million times.
The second most hacked has been another classic: ‘123456789’, a password that can be deciphered in less than a second, NordPass experts warn.
Despite its high vulnerability, ‘123456’ has been used by more than 2.5 million Internet users throughout the planet, followed by its older sister, ‘123456789’ used by almost a million users and which has been exposed almost 8 million times.
In third position appears a password that is a little more reliable than the previous ones. However, it does not test the knowledge of cybercriminals, since they can discover it in just 3 hours.
‘Picture1’ is the third most compromised password in 2020, it has been leaked a total of 11,190 times, according to NordPass, and has been used by 371,612 users. Another of the new passwords that are among the ten most common passwords this year is ‘senha’ (password in Portuguese), which has been used by more than 167,000 Internet users, has been leaked 8,213 times and can be decrypted in approximately 10 seconds.
Most of them are simple and repetitive sequences of numbers and letters, although there are also other categories such as the word ‘password’ (which is in fourth position on the list), food, sports or swear words.
The 200 most frequent passwords tend to be repeated year after year, and according to Nordpass, only 78 of the total passwords on the 2020 list were not present in last year’s, in which ‘12345’ was the most common.
NordPass recommends users avoid using combinations of numbers or letters such as ‘qwerty’ or ‘123456’, as they are too easy to crack, as well as passwords based on personal details such as phone number, date of birth or name .
Additionally, the company recommends that do not use the same password for multiple accountswhich is a key of at least 12 characters with uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols and which is changed approximately every 90 days.