It might have been a joke in Space Balls but it is more true than you might think. The most common password used is the simple sequence of '123456'. And it's common, as in 17% of people use that password. Seventeen flipping percent of people!

The website keepsecurity.com went through 10 million passwords and compiled the most common ones. You might be wondering how they got a hold of 10 million passwords. I know I was. Well, they were passwords that were made public from data breaches in 2016.

Most of the top passwords, including four of the top 10 and seven of the top 15, are actually 6 characters or shorter. And according to keepsecurity.com:

"Today’s brute-force cracking software and hardware can unscramble those passwords in seconds."

And just in case you were wondering about the other top passwords used are as follows.

  1. 123456
  2. 123456789
  3. qwerty
  4. 12345678
  5. 111111
  6. 1234567890
  7. 1234567
  8. password
  9. 123123
  10. 987654321
  11. qwertyuiop
  12. mynoob

So the top 12 are basically sequences of how the keys are lined up on your keyboard, something super simple like 111111 and password. It took until the 12th one to finally get to one that actually took more than just hitting the keys in a specific order.

 

More From 96.5 KNRX