Password security has never been a strong suit among the general population. With much of our social and personal lives now playing out online, you'd think that people would be interested in protecting their digital lives at all costs. In reality, that's little more than wishful thinking.
SplashData has compiled a list of the 25 most popular passwords of 2015 and the results are pretty embarrassing. The complete list is as follows.
1. 123456 (Unchanged)
2. password (Unchanged)
3. 12345678 (Up 1)
4. qwerty (Up 1)
5. 12345 (Down 2)
6. 123456789 (Unchanged)
7. football (Up 3)
8. 1234 (Down 1)
9. 1234567 (Up 2)
10. baseball (Down 2)
11. welcome (New)
12. 1234567890 (New)
13. abc123 (Up 1)
14. 111111 (Up 1)
15. 1qaz2wsx (New)
16. dragon (Down 7)
17. master (Up 2)
18. monkey (Down 6)
19. letmein (Down 6)
20. login (New)
21. princess (New)
22. qwertyuiop (New)
23. solo (New)
24. passw0rd (New)
25. starwars (New)
Predictably, "123456" and "password" once again top the list. Despite the fact that some longer passwords like "1qaz2wsx" (the first columns of main keys on a standard keyboard) and "qwertyuiop" (top row of letters on a standard keyboard) made the list for the first time, they don't offer much security.
Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData, said they have seen an effort by many people to be more secure by adding characters to passwords, but if these longer passwords are based on simple patterns, they will put users in just as much risk of having their identity stolen by hackers.
Curiously enough, Star Wars had a heavy influence over password selection as "starwars," "solo," and "princess" showed up on 2015's list for the first time.
Slain hopes that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will take steps to strengthen their passwords and, most importantly, use different passwords for different websites.