A couple years back, Russia hacked an election. You might recall that. In 2018, billions of people were affected by massive security breaches across the world. Our collective wariness of artificial intelligence, data mining, and even voting machines has been heightened. And yet, we dumbass humans of the cyber world are still "securing" our digital entities with passwords so basic a precocious monkey with one (1) typewriter could hack them.
For the seventh year running, SplashData, which makes password manager applications, released a list of the 25 most used passwords in the last year, per Gizmodo. They also happen to be the worst passwords you can use. In 2018, new entries to the list included "princess" and "sunshine"—what lovely imagery—and "donald"—no thank you! And here's a hearty shout out to all those "admins" and "football" fanatics among us. But for most computer users, it seems the only criteria their password had to fill was "can my fingers reach it without my brain getting involved?"
Check out the full list:
- 123456
- password
- 123456789
- 12345678
- 12345
- 111111
- 1234567
- sunshine
- qwerty
- iloveyou
- princess
- admin
- welcome
- 666666
- abc123
- football
- 123123
- monkey
- 654321
- !@#$%^&*
- charlie
- aa123456
- donald
- password1
- qwerty123
And now for a Security 101 lesson, free of charge: Take four random words and mash them together into a phrase. For instance, a password like "blanketmusktargetcrap" is easy to remember and nearly impossible to guess. Tack on a special character if you must. Do not settle for "123456" or "password," unless you like making your financial and private information an easy target.