Weak passwords should not be a niche issue. They are at the core of daily account takeovers since attackers automate what the majority of people repeat; short strings, common words, and predictable patterns.
Some of the leaks that breached the data have been associated with 2.28 billion passwords in the U.S. alone. It is namely that scale that makes the most commonly picked ones so dangerous: a password that is outed in a leak will most likely be tried in all other places.
One of them gets it all: a reuse of passwords. Once the same credential is used on multiple accounts, a single breach can spread to email, online shopping, cloud storage, and work accounts.
1. Runs of straight numbers, e.g. 123456
Sequential digits have continued to be the first in automated guessing due to ease in typing, easy to memorize, and even easier to crack. 123456 has continued to be an absolute favorite with four point five million in use still today. Longer passwords such as 123456789, 12345678, 1234567 and the short 12345 are not inherently safer as a result of having some minimum length. Attack tools are designed to identify straight sequences in real time.
2. password (and faux-clever variants of it)
The literal use of the word password is a typical failure mode as it is ranked at the head of dictionary-attack lists. The same warning is repeated in security guidance because there is a reason why it is being repeated. According to Ryan Galluzzo of NIST, the most horrible password I can think of is password, or 12345, says Ryan Galluzzo. Variants that merely capitalize the initial letter or add on to the end of it 123, and even,!, are also tested almost as fast.
3. Keyboard-walk passwords like “qwerty” and “qazwsx”
The patterns of the keyboards can be viewed as random to the eye, but cracking software interprets them as a familiar shape. qwerty (top-row swipe) and qazwsx (left-column slide) are recurrently found in password dumps since they provide a sense of difference and are easy to type. Pattern-based decisions are also prone to be repeated in different accounts, thereby raising the exposure, whenever any one site is hacked.
4. Repeated characters: “111111,” “000000,” and “666666”
The repetition will give the illusion of satisfying the length requirement, but not introduce actual uncertainty. Sequences of the same number of digits are one of the quickest numbers to guess and are also used as default PINs, reset placeholders and temporary setups codes that are never reconfigured. They also can be conveniently observed over the shoulder of a person and make a turnout into a copy-and-paste scene to an onlooker.
5. “admin” and “guest” on anything that matters
These are not weak passwords; they are indicators. Admin and guest are default-like passwords that are visited by attackers at scale, particularly on components and services that were installed in a hurry and forgotten. The danger does not just pertain to networks at home; the same habit is being evident in the workplaces, where default logins are at times left much longer than expected.
6. Welcome, amiable words: welcome, hello, sunshine, lovely
Words that are positive and are written in common language are easy to remember- and to add in wordlists. They are also likely to be written with only lowercase letters, which even reduces the search area of attackers. This type is particularly dangerous in corporate environment where onboarding errors such as the welcome can carry on beyond the first day unless systems implement a change.
7. Shortcuts in pop culture: starwars, Pokemon, Batman, superman
Fandom is highly guessable. The terms of the pop culture exist in enormous, ever-renewed cracking dictionaries since they pass through generations and mediums. The passwords also promote easy upgrading such as adding 123 at the end, which is easy to predict, and can be tested by the attackers early.
8. Staples sports and hobbies: football, soccer, mustang
Interest-based passwords are intimate, although they are widely distributed and are often extracted out of open profiles. There are enough team names, enough sports terms, enough iconic car models to be the subject of systematic guessing, with particular effectiveness when those are combined with common number patterns.
9. Names, pet names, and years people can find in minutes
Social engineering is a blessing of personal information. It is not only that michael, daniel, jessica, charlie or jordan appear in wordlists, but also that they are frequently associated with the account owner by public posts. Date-based and year-based passwords are also common: each of the 3 million or so years of birth between the years 1975 and 2010 had at least 3 million passwords in a large sample.
10. Lines that look like a request: you can let me in and I love you
The use of command-like phrases is popular due to the fact that it fits the atmosphere of a login screen: something that is an obstacle that one wants to overcome as soon as possible. iloveyou has the emotional appeal, yet this is precisely why it is included in cracking datasets that never go out of style.
A poor password is hardly a poor password. It is frequently recycled, slightly altered, or supplemented with personal hints that are simple to resolve and one hacked account spawns a chain reaction.
In the circumstances of still using passwords, longer, easier to remember passphrases and an additional line of defense like multifactor authentication are the best practice. The simplest short term victory is easier: before attackers can crack any of the above patterns first, retire any password that resembles the above patterns.
