Experts Agree This Is the World’s Weakest Password

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 17, 9:00AM EST

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Experts Agree This Is the World’s Weakest Password — © RayaHristova / iStock via Getty Images

Decades ago, people did not need passwords unless they were in the military. With endless electric gadgets, many people use them several times a day. They protect smartphones, computers, bank accounts, e-commerce accounts and accounts for streaming services. So, why do so many people use the weakest passwords?

So Many Passwords

When people have a dozen passwords, which they should have for safety reasons, they constantly forget them and then have to hit the “forget password” button. Then, later, they forget them again. Some people use the same password for all accounts, which online security experts say is a bad idea. (19 surprising things the U.S. government knows about you.)

Many online businesses require people to create complicated passwords. They will not allow people to open accounts unless these passwords have one capital letter, one small-cap one, one number (or maybe two), a symbol (?) and nothing that includes the person’s name, address, phone number or a spouse’s name or birthday. Presumably, these are much harder to break than using someone’s name.

Identity theft is a huge problem in America. Hackers have hit huge businesses and taken people’s online identities. An Equifax breach a few years ago exposed the identities of 140 million people. CNN reported, “This breach was particularly alarming as Equifax (EFX) is one of the major companies that tracks credit histories of almost all Americans and sells that sensitive information to banks, credit card companies and other clients.”

The Worst Password

A new report from Nordpass, “The Top 200 Common Passwords,” shows these 200 passwords, how often they have been used in the past year and how long they take to crack. Several took less than a second. The weakest password, because of the number of times it was used and the speed with which it can be hacked, is “123456.” The user count was 4,524,867 times.

Other common passwords that are easy to break and often used are “admin” and “password.” The lesson from the study was that people who get hacked do not try to create hack-resistant passwords.

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.