Weakest, common passwords of 2014 revealed

A study of more than 3.3 million passwords leaked in 2014 has been released, exposing the most overused, predictable passwords.

SplashData released the annual top 25 most common passwords, which represent 2.2% of the 3.3 million leaked passwords studied. According to PC Advisor, this represents a decrease, although by our calculations that still means over 72,000 of the passwords leaked in the sample were in this list. PC Advisor speculates that the decline may be down to a wider awareness of the importance of security, with a number of high profile password leaks pushing the issue up people's agendas in the last year.

That doesn't change the top two from remaining the same as 2013, though, with the worryingly weak '123456' and 'password' occupying the top slots. Elsewhere in the list though, a number of single word new entries emerge, including 'michael', 'mustang', 'baseball', 'football', 'superman', 'batman' and 'dragon.' The last of these, CNET speculates, may owe to the growing popularity of Game of Thrones.

Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData said of the 2014 password list: "As always, we hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites."

The full list is published below. As security expert David Harley noted in a post on the corresponding list from 2012, there is still the strong inclination towards numeric patterns.

Rank	Password	Change from 2013
1	123456	-
2	password	-
3	12345	↑17
4	12345678	↓1
5	qwerty	↓1
6	1234567890	-
7	1234	↑9
8	baseball	NEW
9	dragon	NEW
10	football	NEW
11	1234567	↓4
12	monkey	↑5
13	letmein	↑1
14	abc123	↓9
15	111111	↓8
16	mustang	NEW
17	access	NEW
18	shadow	-
19	master	NEW
20	michael	NEW
21	superman	NEW
22	696969	NEW
23	123123	↓12
24	batman	NEW
25	trustno1	↓1