The Worst Most Common Passwords in America

People’s lives have moved online. They watch TV and videos on PCs and smartphones. They do their banking and buy almost everything they use on e-commerce sites like Amazon. People do not write letters anymore – they use email. They store photos and personal videos in the cloud. Some even buy cars without visiting a dealership. One thing all of these activities have in common is that they require a password.

The nature of passwords means that accounts can be broken into. This can happen on an individual level, but the problem can also involve millions of personal records when a company’s passwords are hacked. This has happened to Yahoo, Facebook, Playstation, Twitter, LinkedIn, Adobe, eBay, Equifax, Dropbox, and other sites that you’d think would have impregnable security. It has become a major risk of life online. (These are the states with the most identity theft.)

The chances of being hacked are greatly increased by the fact that people often use passwords that are easy to break. To determine which are the easiest, 24/7 Tempo reviewed a recent study by the VPN service CyberGhost’s educational initiative The Privacy Hub, titled “The Worst Passwords in the Last Decade (And New Ones You Shouldn’t Use)”.

The study revealed that 81% of all data security breaches are caused by weak passwords, and that “Many passwords believed to be deeply personal to you are, in fact, quite common – making them easier to crack – and they could be putting you at an increased risk of being targeted by cybercriminals.” In addition, according to the report, 60% of people use the same passwords across different accounts and 51% use the same password for work and personal purposes. (Here are the most common passwords in America and how long they take to crack.)

The study listed the most common passwords by category. These included number sequences and variations, the word “password” and variations, keyboard patterns, passwords taken from TV and movie titles, personal names, kinds of animals and names of pets, sports and team names, car brands, IT and technology terms, names of games and applications (and sites). names of celebrities and characters, key events, political names and terms, words from nature, expletives, and miscellaneous terms including those referring to food, colors, locations, and love.

Many of these passwords are astonishingly easy to guess. The easiest include “123456”, “password”, “starwars,” and “Football”. The use of any of the passwords on this list, though – or any other easy ones to guess – shows that people are fools when it comes to protecting themselves online.