People Still Used Dumb Passwords Like '123456' or 'google' in 2016

People Still Used Dumb Passwords Like ‘123456’ or ‘google’ in 2016

In this modern world, we have become accustomed to having several passwords for the various online accounts that we created over time. Since a sizeable chunk of Internet users end up having more than one online account, they are forced to come up with complex passwords which can be hard to remember.

To solve this existential crisis, people result to creating passwords that are easy to remember but others usually decide to use password managers like LastPass. Sadly, the majority of people tend to use simple passwords (Twitter password leak for example) which can be easily guessed by hackers who might take control of their accounts and do whatever with the data in the accounts.

Sure enough, a report has revealed a list of passwords that people were using for the year 2016 and it is not different from what we saw for 2015.

Keeper Security scoured through 10 million passwords which went public thanks to the various data breaches that happened in 2016 and were able to notice several things:

Nearly 17% of users still use 123456 as their password.
4 out of 10 passwords and 7 out the top 15 passwords are six characters or shorter.
People use passwords with patterns like “1q2w3e4r” or “1234qwe” which are weak and can be cracked by dictionary based password crackers.
Email providers are not working hard enough to prevent spamming and the use of random passwords like “18atcskd2w” or “3rjs1la7qe” which are used by bots over and over again while setting up dummy accounts.

Here is the list of the 25 most common passwords of 2016 (that you need to avoid completely)