These Are The Worst Passwords Of The Last Decade

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 9, 8:25AM EST

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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 programs like Word and 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 people’s accounts can be broken into. The largest hacks involve millions of records when a company is hacked. This happened to Playstation customers in 2011. It has become a major risk of life online.

One risk of being hacked is that people often use passwords that are easy to break. Some passwords are unusually common and therefore particularly easy to hack. These often involve common names and sets of numbers.

CyberGhost recently released a study titled “The Worst Passwords in the Last Decade (And New Ones You Shouldn’t Use)”.

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The primary conclusion of the research was “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.” Another conclusion was that over eight out of ten hacks are based on weak passwords. Finally, people often use the same password across all of their online accounts.

The study listed the most common passwords by category. These included numbers, names, variations of the word “password”, keyboard-based passwords, passwords taken from movie titles, names from animals and pets, names of professional sports teams, names of car brands, names of technologies, names of games. names of celebrities, events, names of politicians, words from nature, expletives, and food, colors, and locations.

Many of these passwords are astonishingly easy to guess. They include “123456”, “password”, “starwars” and “Football”.

Taken together, the data from the study show that people are fools when it comes to protecting themselves online.

Click here to read Countries with the Most Leaked Passwords

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.