6 Billion Leaked Passwords: The Most Commonly Stolen Credentials to Avoid
Over the course of the past year, security researchers at Specops Software examined six billion leaked passwords and subsequently published a comprehensive report on their findings. This report not only provides insight into the most commonly used passwords, but also into the current threat posed by leaks.
These are the most frequently stolen passwords
Sadly, the top five most stolen passwords show that few users have learned their lesson in recent years. As before, the passwords are as follows:
- 123456
- 123456789
- 12345678
- admin
- Password
It’s alarming that most people apparently do not even bother to choose individual words as passwords. In addition to the five most common passwords, the researchers also frequently discovered password combinations with words such as hello, welcome, guest ,or student.
This suggests that these are not only private accounts, but also company, university or public access data.The ever-popular “qwerty” is also represented again, i.e.simply the first six letters of a keyboard that uses an english layout.
Passwords ending in “@123” or “