Urgent warning to change your online passwords today if you see them on this list
Experts have warned that millions of Britons have passwords that are easily hackable, even when they think its safe.
Despite constant warnings from cybersecurity experts, millions of Britons still use passwords that are extremely easy to guess. A new survey from NordPass, a password manager, shared the list of most commonly used passwords in the UK, and results show that many of us don’t listen to important advice urging to us to create better passwords for our personal data. In 2022, “password” became the most commonly used password, beating last year’s winner “123456”, which has dropped to second place.
Sharing the results of its research NordPass found that password creation trends differ among different countries and by gender, and is even affected by pop culture trends.
In the UK, they noted the following as the most common passwords:
- password
- 123456
- guest
- liverpool
- qwerty
- arsenal
- 123456789
- password1
- 12345
- 12345678
- chelsea
- charlie
- abc123
- liverpool1
- Parola12
- football
- monkey
- chocolate
- yuantuo2012
- letmein
If your password is on this list, this could be a major problem, as cyber security experts warn that your accounts could be hacked in less than a second, in 83 percent of these instances.
Over 4.9 million people globally use "password" as their password, with variations like "password1" and "password123" being very popular.
Sports-related passwords are also extremely popular, with “liverpool” is the fourth most common password in the UK, “arsenal” ranking sixth, and “chelsea” being 11th.
For users to better secure their personal information, NordPass highlighted a few essential tips:
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- Be aware of all accounts that are in your possession: By deleting unused accounts and keeping track of the exact number of active accounts and passwords you have, you can ensure that there are no gaps present
- Make long, unique passwords, and never reuse them. Complicated combinations of numbers, uppercase, lowercase letters, and symbols make the most robust passwords. Reusing them is never an option — if one account gets hacked, other accounts are at risk.
- Use a password manager: These password managers fully encrypts your passwords, and protect and store them for your use.
Tomas Smalakys, the chief technology officer of NordPass said: “Throughout the years, we observe almost identical password management mistakes, which suggests people simply prefer convenience.
“If we cannot do better with passwords, we should do better than passwords.
“Last year marks a huge milestone in search of alternative online authentication solutions, with passkey technology paving a way to replace passwords in the future.”