There are a few things you can rely on at Christmas time: a lack of snow in the UK, terrible office hangovers, and the release of SplashData’s worst passwords of the year list.
Every year, the security group analyses more than five million leaked passwords on the internet and collates them together in a handy list. Surprise, surprise, the phrases that top the list are the same year after year.
In first place, for the eighth year running, is “123456”, as the worst password to use in 2019. It looks like people still enjoy using easily-guessable number combinations as their passwords, including “1234567” “12345678” and “12345” all made it into the top 10 list.
In another unsurprising move, “password” and “qwerty” were also in the top five of the worst passwords.
Here is the top 10 worst passwords list of 2019 in all its glory:
SplashData's worst passwords of 2019
- 123456
- 12345678
- qwerty
- password
- 1234567
- 12345678
- 12345
- iloveyou
- 111111
- 123123
When it comes to passwords, there’s a few hygiene rules to adhere to. Don’t use the same password for every account, make sure it’s a strong password featuring at least 16 characters that are a mixture of lowercase, uppercase, numbers and characters, and have a password manager, such as Dashlane or LastPass to store all these combinations.
Often password managers can generate strong passwords for you, and then keep them in an app locked using biometric data, such your smartphone’s facial recognition or fingerprint scanner tech. If you don’t want to download another app, then Google Chrome includes a password manager, as well as the iPhone’s iOS – both platforms offer suggestions of unbreakable passwords when selecting a new one and then lock them away for safekeeping.
But then again, everyone falls prey to an internet hack every now and again. Just this week, it was revealed that the developer of the hit game Words With Friends, Zynga, was hit by data breach in September which affected 170 million accounts. If you were a Words With Friends player, make sure to change your password and ensure you haven’t used the same email and password combo for any other account.
Dashlane collates its worst password offenders list every year and for 2019, Facebook has topped the list. The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company has come under fire this year for exposing passwords belonging to hundreds of millions of users and for breaching user privacy by asking for the email passwords of new users and harvesting contacts without consent.
This week, the company has been criticised for using user location data, even when they have opted to turn off the function, in order to target ads.
Also on the Dashlane list was actor Lisa Kudrow who committed a major password faux pas this year when she posted a picture of her computer monitor on Instagram, with had a post-it note with her password attached to it.
Speaking about the annual list, Dashlane co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Schalit, said: "The drudgery of passwords, account creation and recovery, and the fear of what you need to do after a big company data breach are all legitimate concerns for everyone using the internet. Our Worst Password Offenders list serves as an annual reminder for how easy it is to make a misstep on the web, no matter your status.”
Improving your online security is one new year’s resolution you should commit to every year.
