One password for every 142 is 123456

Dates of birth, names of children or pets, but above all 123456. This is still incredibly the most popular and used password in the world. A bad practice that we have written about on these pages several times in the past: in 2014, 2018 and 2019 only to recall the most recent examples.

123456 remains the most common password

The umpteenth testimony is represented by the study conducted by Ata Hakçıl, a Cypriot student of computer engineering who took into consideration the credentials subject to violation in the many leaks and data breaches of recent years. In a somewhat predictable way 123456 remains at the top of the ranking of secret words chosen most frequently (even once out of 142) for access to online services and platforms. However, it is not the only interesting statistic that emerges from the analysis.

the 1,000 most common passwords are chosen in the or 6.61% of the cases; extending the sample to the million most common passwords, the percentage rises to 36,28%; whereas the ten million most common passwords, you arrive to 54%; the average length of a password is 9,48 characters; that is the 12,04% of passwords contain a special character; the 28,79% of the password is composed of letters; the 26,16% password consists of only lowercase letters; 13.37% the password is composed of only sole digits; the 34,41% of the passwords ending with a digit, but only 4,52% starts with a number. In the era of cybersecurity may seem superfluous to underline how the choice of a password that is strong is crucial to ensure the integrity of their information, but it is not so. Absolutely avoid even the adoption of the same secret key for multiple services. The council is to rely on tools such as those that are now integrated in almost all operating systems and software to generate complex codes and store them automatically without even the obligation of having to store it in our data, our reputation, our security.

Source: GitHub