THE WORST PASSWORDS OF 2022

According to Cybernews

Data breaches and cyberattacks are becoming more and more common. In order to keep your online identity and private information safe, taking care of your passwords is as essential as ever.

One of the key elements of a strong password is its uniqueness. But some passwords are anything but that. Here are the most commonly used passwords & phrases used in passwords by people around the world.

The top 10 most common passwords list:

  1. 123456
  2. 123456789
  3. qwerty
  4. password
  5. 12345
  6. qwerty123
  7. 1q2w3e
  8. 12345678
  9. 111111
  10. 1234567890

Yes, a bunch of people used “login”.

3 Simple Tips for Better Passwords

  1.   Use a length of 12 or more characters with mixed types of characters.
  2.   Avoid using the same password over and over on different websites.
  3.   Use a password manager to organize and generate random passwords.

Most frequent things in passwords

In order to create simple, memorable combinations for their websites, many people choose to connect them to something that they can easily recall. But that doesn’t make the password unique: actually, it’s quite the opposite!

During our research, we analyzed over 15 billion entries and separated them into different categories and terms. These right here are some of the most common things used in passwords – if you use something like this in your own combinations, you might want to think twice.

Most popular years used in passwords

One of the most interesting things is when we looked at which years from 1900-2020 were the most used by people when they made passwords.

Making a rough assumption, people may generally use years in their passwords to mark:

  • their birth year
  • the year in which the password was created
  • a special year

From our analysis, we see that the most popular year was 2010, with nearly 10 million versions of this year used in passwords. The second-most popular used year was 1987 at 8.4 million, and the third was 1991 at nearly 8.3 million.

Looking at the graph in total, there’s a steady increase in usage from around 1940 all the way to 1990. The trend goes down after that, to rise again sharply from 2004 to 2010.

The internet’s favorite name as a password

The winner is: Eva, but just barely. The #2 name is Alex, which comes in about 50,000 instances less than Eva. After that is Anna, and it tapers down consistently to the #10 most common password name, Daniel.

The world’s favorite sports team – and sport used in creating passwords

Looking at the data for sports teams, we get an idea of not only which the top sports teams around the world are, but also which are the most favored sports:

The number one sports team, at least for the English-language world, seems to be the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, followed by the superior Miami Heat (full disclosure: I’m from Miami). Third up is the MLB’s Cincinnati Reds. Of course, since these are generic terms, there’s a possibility that some of these terms aren’t sports-related – but that’s essentially the risk with all the terms in these statistics.

European soccer (football clubs) come in three times in the top ten, with Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal taking the #5, #6 and #8 spots, respectively.

In total, we can see that there are five NBA teams, two from MLB, and three European football clubs. From this, we can assume that the NBA is, by far, the most popular sport in the world, followed by European football/soccer (even though some stats show that soccer is number one, and basketball comes in at number 3).

When we skew our understanding to the English-language world, with a lot of data coming from the US and the West, the findings in our password analysis seem to correlate.

Just for fun, the least popular sports team to use in passwords is “wolverhamptonwanderers,” used just 3 times, which I’m told is pretty accurate based on their overall performance.

The internet’s favorite curse word as password

Another aspect we were interested in was to see how many passwords contained curse words, and which curse words were favored the most.

Based on our analysis, a total of 152,933,335 passwords contained curse words. Out of 2.2 billion unique passwords, that’s about 7%.

Results show that the Internet’s favorite curse word is “ass” coming in at nearly 27 million usages, followed by “sex” at a little over 5 million. The world’s most flexible ‘F’ word comes in at third place, being used in fewer than 5 million passwords.

The world’s most common city used in passwords

When looking at the data, we see that many users added some variation of their city name to their passwords. Now, before looking at our analysis, we can guesstimate a reason as to why people would do that: pride or love for their city.

Even if it is just a recognition of their birth city, adding that to their passwords would most likely indicate some sort of appreciation for the city, unless it’s something like “ihatephiladelphia2020!”

The most common cities to use in passwords?

Coming in at number one is “abu” which would most likely represent the UAE capital Abu Dhabi. The number two city is Rome, the fancy capital of Italy.

Third goes to Lima in Peru, followed by “hong” for Hong Kong, and the list continues the trend of international, non-US cities. In fact, only three American cities seem to have ended up on this list: York (as in New York), Austin, and “antonio” for San Antonia, and interestingly the latter are both in Texas.