These Are The Most Hackable Passwords And It’s Time To Change If You’re Using One Of Them

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Cybersecurity is no joke. We’ve witnessed MASSIVE data breaches over the past few years from Yahoo! (twice), Marriott, Adult Friend Finder, MySpace, eBay, LinkedIn, and countless others. This has led to a flood of personal information being sold on the internet’s black market, personal info which includes your passwords.

I think it should go without saying that you should be using different passwords everywhere on the Internet that you use a password. Furthermore, you could be using a robust password with a combination of randomness, special characters, letters, numbers, and lower + upper capitalization. That’s what you should be doing but chances are you get lazy when creating certain passwords just like most of the population.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) ran a worldwide study that analyzed passwords of accounts that had been hacked in these enormous data breaches and what they found is many people are EMBARRASSINGLY BASIC when it comes to cybersecurity. They use passwords which could be hacked in an instant. But they also discovered a lot of other information in this study so let’s dive right in.

Here are the top 10 most commonly used passwords in the world (in the English language?):

1. 123456 (used by 23.2 million accounts)
2. 123456789 (used by 7.7 million compromised accounts)
3. qwerty (used by 3+ million hacked accounts)
4. password (used by 3+ million accounts that were brached)
5. 111111
6. 12345678
7. abc123
8. 1234567
9. password1
10. 12345

I’m not at all surprised to learn that the Dallas Cowboys are also the most commonly used and easily hackable NFL account, according to CNN:

Ashley and Michael were the most common names used, followed by Daniel, Jessica and Charlie.

Liverpool topped the table of Premier League football clubs used as passwords, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United (“manutd”) making up the rest of the top four. Manchester City (“mancity”), by contrast, would finish in 11th place in the Premier League password standings.

The Dallas Cowboys (“cowboys1”) was the most popular NFL team nickname, while Sunday was the most used day of the week and August the most common month.

“iloveyou” just missed out on the top 10, while “monkey” and “dragon” made surprise appearances in the top 20. Plenty of users also used passwords as an opportunity to employ a colorful array of swear words. (via CNN)

Protect yourself online, my dudes. Create random passwords by stringing together common words in unfamiliar wiays. The industry-wide recommendation is to use three random but memorable words and you can also throw in numbers or special characters if needed but make them words you know well and then structure the password in a way that wouldn’t make any sense to a hacker.

For more on this, you can click here to read the full report on CNN.

Cass Anderson BroBible headshot and avatar
Cass Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of BroBible. Based out of Florida, he covers an array of topics including NFL, Pop Culture, Fishing News, and the Outdoors.