Just about everyone knows at this point that it’s important to use a strong password. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from using the dumbest passwords imaginable. NordPass just published its annual lists of the most popular easy-to-crack passwords, and there are quite a few bad ones, as well as some head-scratchers.
The people behind NordPass, a password manager, have been compiling these lists for six years now, analyzed from sets of passwords stolen by malware and exposed in data leaks. The latest batch of lists include not just personal credentials like in previous years, but also corporate passwords.
This year’s lists include data from 44 countries, and it’s interesting to see how the most common bad passwords vary by country. For instance, the most common bad password in Canada is “qwerty123,” while in the U.S. it’s “secret.” But overall across the 44 countries analyzed, the most common password is “123456.”
Below, we’ve got the top 20 most common passwords overall across 44 countries, along with the top 20 lists for a few other countries like the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. You can find all the lists at NordPass.
Overall Top 20 (44 countries)
- 123456
- 123456789
- 12345678
- password
- qwerty123
- qwerty1
- 111111
- 12345
- secret
- 123123
- 1234567890
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- 000000
- qwerty
- abc123
- password1
- iloveyou
- 11111111
- dragon
U.S. Top 20
- secret
- 123456
- password
- qwerty123
- qwerty1
- 123456789
- password1
- 12345678
- 12345
- abc123
- qwerty
- iloveyou
- Password
- baseball
- 1234567
- 111111
- princess
- football
- monkey
- sunshine
Canada Top 20
- qwerty123
- 123456
- qwerty1
- password
- 123456789
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 9-11-1961
- secret
- 12345
- password1
- abc123
- 1234567890
- Owerty123
- Password
- 1234567
- iloveyou
- hockey
- 123123
- canada
Mexico Top 20
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty123
- qwerty1
- 12345678
- 12345
- password
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- qwerty
- pokemon
- contrase
- alejandro
- america
- hola
- carlos
- Qwerty123
- Qwerty1!
- 123123
- 1234561
Do you see any of your favorite passwords on the list? It seems appropriate that “hockey” would make the list in Canada, but we’re a bit perplexed about what the significance behind “9-11-1961” might be. Obviously, it looks like a date that either stands for September 11, 1961 (the American format) or November 9, 1961 (the rest of the world). But Google searches haven’t given us any obvious answers for why this might be a common password.
The passwords broken out for being just from corporate sources also reveal a couple of odd choices. In the U.S. the password “aaron431” is ranked as the fifth most popular. But we have to admit we’re not sure why that could be. We can speculate there might be some corporate passwords that have been leaked from one big company that’s skewing the data in a way. If “aaron431” was chosen as the default password for some gigantic corporation and that particular company saw a very bad breach, it would make sense to see that one more frequently.
Let us know in the comments if you’ve found something particularly funny in the data.