2016 proved to be a little weird for internet users.
Taking into account the bizarre most trending Google searches of the year, it makes sense that the most common passwords of 2016 weren’t far from ridiculous.
There are two major reasons why more and more internet users are getting hacked: people are choosing common passwords and websites aren’t imposing stringent specifications.
Everyone knows there are strict requirements for a new password these days. Whether it be a certain amount of characters, capital letters or a mobile authentication, choosing a password is a difficult process.
The reason behind the excessive limits is to ensure the user’s safety. Cyber security firm Keeper found that nearly 17% of hacked passwords in 2016 were ‘123456.’
To explain the random ‘3rjs1la7qe’ and ’18atcskd2w’ passwords, Security Researcher Graham Cluley says they were created “by bots, perhaps with the intention of posting spam onto the forums.” However, the passwords ‘google’ and ‘mynoob’ were more unmistakably created by humans.
Keeper sorted through 10 million passwords that became public on the world wide web through data breaches in 2016. From the data they found that not only were users creating blatantly obvious passwords – a lot of websites weren’t properly warranting safety measures for their users.
“We can criticize all we want about the chronic failure of users to employ strong passwords. After all, it’s in the user’s best interests to do so. But the bigger responsibility lies with website owners who fail to enforce the most basic password complexity policies. It isn’t hard to do, but the list makes it clear that many still don’t bother.”
The most common passwords of 2016 were:
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty
- 12345678
- 111111
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- password
- 123123
- 987654321
- qwertyuiop
- mynoob
- 123321
- 666666
- 18atcskd2w
- 7777777
- 1q2w3e4r
- 654321
- 555555
- 3rjs1la7qe
- 1q2w3e4r5t
- 123qwe
- zxcvbnm
- 1q2w3e
