50 Worst Passwords List. If you use any, change it NOW!

Passwords were first used by the military in ancient Rome to differentiate between friend and foe. We have come a long way from there and the term is most widely used to protect one’s digital accounts from intruders (hackers).

The other change is that unlike the past where military generals use to create a password or passphrase, now the onus of creating a password is on each individual.

As will be evident after looking at the list below, despite a lot of help available on the internet, not everyone is capable of creating strong passwords. Nordpass compiled a list of 200 most popular passwords of 2019 and they looked into 500 million passwords for the same.

Quite an impressive number, however, the results are all but impressive. Have a look at it yourself.

The most popular passwords are, obviously the most obvious and easy to guess number combinations (12345,111111,123321), and popular female names from western countries (Nicole, Jessica, Hannah), and some random-looking strings of letters but they actually form a horizontal or vertical line on a QWERTY keyboard (asdfghjkl, qazwsx, 1qaz2wsx, etc.).

Most surprisingly, the most obvious one — “password” — remains very popular; 830,846 people still use it. They choose their password to be just ‘password’, what an inspiring effort… what are these people smoking?

Other notable pieces of ingenuity were Password (with a capital P), OOOOOO, 123, love123, a123456, qwert, 11111111, 7777777, testing, superman, 54321, f*ckyou, loveyou, whatever, and for the religious ones – jesus.

So what can you do?

Review passwords for all your important online accounts, whether email or bank accounts or your social media accounts.

Make sure that you are not using the same password across all your accounts. Keep unique passwords, so that even if someone hacks into one of your accounts, they have to do the same amount of effort for the second account as well.

Replace the passwords with strong ones. We suggest a length of at least 10 characters with 1 special character, at least 1 Capital letter (preferably not the first one if there is only 1), at least one special character (any of !@#$%^&*()~) and at least 1 number.

It is always a good practice to not choose words or numbers that can be associated with you (like your/spouse’s birthday, anniversary date, house/car/mobile number, etc)

Enable 2 Factor Authentication i.e., adding another layer of security where an OTP is sent to your mobile, email account or an app, OR a second authentication is taken using biometric or hardware security key to keep your accounts safe.

We hope that you will use caution with your passwords in the future and that you liked this article. If you did, spread the word and share this one with the people you care for.