The top 25 worst passwords of the past year were
announced Tuesday by SplashData, a California-based tech company specializing in security applications, and it shows that Star Wars has forced itself into the collective subconscious.
As it has been for years now, the absolute most common, most easy to guess, and therefore terrible passwords are: "123456," "password," and "12345678."
The annual list of worst passwords is compiled from more than 2 million passwords leaked during the past year.
"We have seen an effort by many people to be more secure by adding characters to passwords, but if these longer passwords are based on simple patterns they will put you in just as much risk of having your identity stolen by hackers," said Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData.
"As we see on the list, using common sports and pop culture terms is also a bad idea. We hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will take steps to strengthen their passwords and, most importantly, use different passwords for different websites."
Dishonorable mentions that didn't make the top 10 on the list included "abc123," "dragon," "letmein," and "monkey."
Brand new on the list are "princess," "starwars," and "solo," seemingly referring to Han Solo.
As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, "Until all passwords are replaced with fingerprint readers, facial or voice recognition, good passwords should include at least 12 characters with combinations of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters."
Gathered below are the 25 most common passwords of 2015.
123456
password
12345678
qwerty
12345
123456789
football
1234
1234567
baseball
welcome
1234567890
abc123
111111
1qaz2wsx
dragon
master
monkey
letmein
login
princess
qwertyuiop
solo
passw0rd
starwars