One in Six Accounts Secured With Password ‘123456’

Published on: January 17th, 2017

The team at Keeper, a password manager application, has compiled a list of 2016’s most commonly used passwords, and yet again people have chosen the simplistic “123456” as their favorite password in 2016.

According to the Keeper team, this list has been compiled by aggregating passwords leaked in data breaches during the past year.

The Keeper team assembled over 10 million leaked user records, and after analyzing the leaked data, more than 1.7 million accounts were secured with the “123456” password, almost one in every six profiles.

123456 ranked first for the third year in a row, after similar research from TeamsID placed it at the top of the worst passwords list in both 2014 and 2015.

The full list of the worst passwords of 2016 is as follows:

123456
123456789
qwerty
12345678
111111
1234567890
1234567
password
123123
987654321
qwertyuiop
mynoob
123321
666666
18atcskd2w
7777777
1q2w3e4r
654321
555555
3rjs1la7qe
google
1q2w3e4r5t
123qwe
zxcvbnm
1q2w3e
Most of the above passwords are simple combinations that we’ve seen time and time again, but two passwords stand apart, due to their high-level of complexity: 18atcskd2w and 3rjs1la7qe.

These passwords belong to accounts leaked from the VerticalScope Network in June, and most likely belong to spam bots that have signed up for the VerticalScope forums.

Besides these two passwords, the top 25 list is pestered with simple passwords, showing once more why using a password manager to generate and remember passwords is a must in your daily cyber-life, where sometimes you might need to handle and remember tens or hundreds of passwords each month. Without a password manager, most users resort to reusing (complex) passwords, or using simplistic passwords that are easy to guess.