"Revealed: The Top 200 Most Common Passwords of 2022"

Despite their insecurity, sequential strings of numbers and "password" remain users' most popular password choices worldwide. NordPass' annual study of the top 200 most popular passwords also revealed that in the UK, names of football teams ranked highly among the most-used passwords of the year. For example, the password "liverpool" was the fourth most popular of the year, while "arsenal," "chelsea," and "liverpool1" were all in the top 15. Regional results, such as those from France, revealed similarly insecure password practices, but the actual passwords differed. For example, the third most popular password in the country was "azerty," the equivalent of "qwert" on a French keyboard layout. NordPass also included data sets organized by user gender, which revealed some significant differences in password frequency. In the US, the most popular password among women was "guest," while "12345" was the most popular among men. The most secure password in the top 200 was "9136668099," which is estimated to take hackers four days to crack. However, it is still not a secure password because it contains no letters or special characters. Regularly updating one's password is good security practice, and experts advise against using easy-to-guess words or phrases, or anything that a threat actor could easily link to an individual. Hackers employ various password-cracking techniques, but brute-force attacks, in which hackers guess a victim's password through different forms of trial and error, are common. Hackers can use powerful hardware such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to speed up password cracking, but the most basic brute-force attacks involve trying common passwords until access is granted, which is reason enough for users to avoid using anything that resembles a password in the top 200. This article continues to discuss findings from NordPass' report on the top 200 most common passwords.

ITPro reports "Revealed: The Top 200 Most Common Passwords of 2022"