It has become a tradition over the past few years to have a worst passwords list for the previous year, SplashData has actually been doing it for five years now, and it seems that every year it’s exactly the same. The firm’s list was compiled by aggregating passwords from the nearly two million that were leaked online in 2015 to find out which are the most common and terrible passwords. Just like it was back in 2014, “123456” remained the most popular worst password in 2015.
“123456” is first on the list of worst passwords of 2015 but it’s certainly not the only one that’s easy to guess. In the second place there’s “password,” yes people actually use that, with “12345678” coming in third place followed by “qwerty” at number four on the list.
There are some new entries on the list of worst passwords but they are dictated by things like sports and pop culture. For example, on last year’s list the new entries include “starwars,” “solo,” “princess,” and even “football” and “basketball” have made it to the top 25.
If your password matches one on this list then it goes without saying that you should immediately change it to something that can’t be guessed easily. One way to go about securing your online accounts is to use a passphrase instead of a password, something that’s unique to you and very hard to guess even for people that know you personally. The other way is to not use stupid passwords.