The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) compiled its own list of the 20 most common passwords in 2019, from 100 million passwords leaked in data breaches this year.
Top 20 most common passwords according to NCSC
Rank Password
1 123456
2 123456789
3 qwerty
4 password
5 1111111
6 12345678
7 abc123
8 1234567
9 password
10 12345
11 1234567890
12 123123
13 000000
14 Iloveyou
15 1234
16 1q2w3e4r5t
17 Qwertyuiop
18 123
19 Monkey
20 Dragon
Did yours make the list?
If you recognize any of the above as your own, fixing your password is one of the things that deserve a place on your list of New Year’s resolutions. Fixing means not having the exact same idea as millions of other people when you’re signing up to a service and are asked to create your password.
One way to go about this is passphrase, which, if done right, is generally tougher to crack and easier to remember with or without spaces, typically more than 20 character long, and easily memorable. It is a way of increasing security, and without the cryptic series of letters, numbers, and symbols, improving usability . Especially useful if you don’t use password management software, which, somewhat unsurprisingly, has been shown to benefit both password strength and uniqueness. Yes, that passphrase should, of course, be unique for each of your online accounts, as recycling your passwords across various services is asking for trouble.
You may also want to watch out for password leaks. There are a number of services these days where you can check if your login credentials may have been caught up in a known breach. Some of them even offer you the option to sign up for alerts if your login information is compromised in a breach.
In fact, as ours is an era where login data are compromised by the millions, why settle for one line of defense if you can have two? At the risk of repeating ourselves, two-factor authentication is a highly valuable way to add an additional layer of security to online accounts on top of your password.
Comments