The most popular passwords of 2018 revealed: Are yours on the list?

Besides the usual suspects among the worst of passwords, a handful of notable – but similarly poor – choices make their debuts

Password security company SplashData has released its annual list of the most commonly used passwords on the web, and the picture isn’t pretty.

The number one spot belongs to ‘123456’, which is followed by another maddeningly obvious choice, ‘password’. In fact, these two are stalwarts of the most common passwords, having claimed the first two spots for the fifth year in a row.

The next five places are occupied by some of the easiest-to-remember (and guess) assortments of numbers. The coldness of numbers contrasts with some of the next highly-popular choices – ‘sunshine’, ‘iloveyou’ and ‘princess’, with the first and the third of them representing new additions to the list. Unfortunately, despite oozing oodles of optimism, these passwords don’t inspire much confidence in that the netizens using them cultivate some of the most fundamental cyber-hygiene habits. Also new among the top 25 are ‘666666’, ‘charlie’, and ‘donald’, among others.

Rank	Password	Change from 2017
1	123456	Unchanged
2	password	Unchanged
3	123456789	Up 3
4	12345678	Down 1
5	12345	Unchanged
6	111111	New
7	1234567	Up 1
8	sunshine	New
9	qwerty	Down 5
10	iloveyou	Unchanged
11	princess	New
12	admin	Down 1
13	welcome	Down 1
14	666666	New
15	abc123	Unchanged
16	football	Down 7
17	123123	Unchanged
18	monkey	Down 5
19	654321	New
20	!@#$%^&*	New
21	charlie	New
22	aa123456	New
23	donald	New
24	password1	New
25	qwerty123	New

Source: SplashData’s Top 100 Worst Passwords of 2018

SplashData estimates that no fewer than 10 percent of people “have used at least one of the 25 worst passwords on this year’s list”. In addition, almost 3 percent of people are estimated to have used the most common poor password, ‘123456’.

A cursory look at SplashData’s extended list of the 100 most common passwords shows that almost all of them are short numerical strings or keyboard patterns, first names or words that appear in any English dictionary, and sports or pop culture references. This year’s edition of the ranking is based on more than five million passwords leaked by computer users mostly in North America and Western Europe.

It goes without saying that if your password made it among those most common password choices, you would be very well advised to change it. A video and several articles with tips for coming up with far more secure passwords are below.

No matter how stubborn, however, a password is still only a single barrier between your account and a hacker. This is why it’s worth enabling an extra layer of security by adding an extra authentication factor, particularly for accounts that contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or other important data.