With people reduced to the confines of their homes for the most parts of 2020, work culture took a major turn towards going digital. The increase in online presence encourages the idea of having stronger passwords than ever before. People, however, are least bothered.
That is what a new report by password manager NordPass tells us. The report mentions the ¡°worst 200 passwords of 2020¡± in a list that is rather mind-boggling for anyone aware of the possible cyber-crimes in the online world.
Apart from just listing the passwords, the report also details how many people use it as their password as well as the number of times it has been exposed. The report even lists the time it takes to crack these passwords and sadly enough, most of them are listed with ¡°less than one second.¡±
Most of the passwords listed in the report should not even be considered as a possible safety combination, let alone in the digital world where guessing a password takes only a moment. Just as claimed, the list names all the worst passwords once could possibly have.
¡®123456¡¯ for instance, was used as a password?by more than 2.5 million people in 2020. As can be expected, it was exposed more than 23 million times, with an average time to crack just only under a second.
Other such passwords include ¡®password¡¯, ¡®111111¡¯, ¡®123123¡¯, ¡®12345¡¯, ¡®1234567890¡¯ and more such straight up numbers. Comparing these passwords to the worst ones in 2019, some new entries to the list include ¡®picture1¡¯, ¡®senha¡¯, ¡®Million2¡¯, ¡®aaron431¡¯ and more.
The whole idea of the list is to inform people if their password is weak. The data can come as a stark reminder that setting a strong password is important for data privacy and security online and that weak passwords can easily compromise this.
¡°Check if your password is on the list and strengthen it if it is,¡± warns NordPass. You can check out the entire list here.