"Why Are You Still Using QWERTY? 2021's Most Common Passwords Revealed"
Researchers at Nordpass analyzed password habits worldwide and revealed that we are still performing poorly regarding strong credential management. Major online service providers now often enforce strong passwords with lower-case and capital letters, numbers, and special characters and may also encourage and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA). However, businesses may not impose the same standards. In addition, ghost and forgotten accounts, hardcoded credentials, and the re-use of username and password combinations are still common problems today. Nordpass evaluated a database containing 4TB of leaked passwords, which originated from the US, Canada, Russia, Australia, and Europe. Among the findings, the researchers found that a "stunning" number of people like to use their own name as a password ("charlie" appeared as the 9th most popular password in the UK in 2021). According to the researchers, the most common passwords in 2021, worldwide, were:
- 123456 (103,170,552 hits)
- 123456789 (46,027,530 hits)
- 12345 (32,955,431 hits)
- qwerty (22,317,280 hits)
- password (20,958,297 hits)
- 12345678 (14,745,771 hits)
- 111111 (13,354,149 hits)
- 123123 (10,244,398 hits)
- 1234567890 (9,646,621 hits)
- 1234567 (9,396,813 hits)
ZDNet reports: "Why Are You Still Using QWERTY? 2021's Most Common Passwords Revealed"