While standard passwords, including “qwerty“, remain on SplashData’s list, passwords inspired by Star Wars: The Force Awakens also emerged.
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With the release of the latest Star Wars…it’s of little surprise to find that new passwords added to the list include “princess”, “solo”, and “starwars”.
The most common password of past year is “123456”, which sadly probably isn’t a surprise considering statistically there’s a good chance you’re reading this story and that’s your password. Despite the introduction of some new and longer passwords required by some websites, “the longer passwords are so simple as to make their extra length virtually worthless as a security measure”, the company said in a blog post.
New, but equally poor passwords joined the 2015 list, including “welcome” and “login” made their debut.
Using common sports and pop culture terms is also a bad idea.
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.
Password management firm SplashData has just released their list of the Worst Passwords of 2015 and found that repeat offenders like “123456” and “password” are still top of the list. Numerous most common passwords are loaded into software created to crack accounts.
Especially in the last few years, when rankings listing the world’s weakest passwords have gained more and more publicity, Internet users should’ve become savvier about the need to discourage potential hackers more effectively.
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Hopefully, this new ranking will help people know which words of identification to avoid at least from this point onward, and convince them to imagine passwords that are random, lengthy, intricate (combining letters in different cases, numbers and symbols) and yet easy to memorize and recall. But this too can be a problem: recently it was revealed that popular password manager LastPass was vulnerable to hackers, potentially putting even the most conscientious users at risk.
