The massive LinkedIn hack proves that people are absolutely awful at picking passwords

Rob PriceMay 20, 2016, 15:42 IST

Stephanie Houghton of Great Britain shows her dejection after the Women's Football Quarter Final match between Great Britain and Canada, on Day 7 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at City of Coventry Stadium on August 3, 2012 in Coventry, England.Julian Finney/Getty Images

We know that people are awful at picking passwords - and the huge hack of LinkedIn confirms it.

The professional social network was breached back in 2012, but it has come back into the news this week as we finally learned the true scale of it: A whopping 167 million accounts were compromised, including 117 million passwords.

The passwords were hashed - encrypting hem so that they can't be read - but researchers at LeakedSource have been able to decrypt them. Their findings show just how much the same passwords get used over and over (and over and over and over and over) again.

(We first saw the LeakedSource data over on ZDNet.)

The single most popular password? 123456. That was used by more than 750,000 accounts. In number two is the unimaginative "linkedin" (172,523), followed by "password" (144,458), and "123456789" (94,214).

The data for the top 49 passwords is below. Now hurry up and change yours.

Rank	Password	Frequency
1	123456	753,305
2	linkedin	172,523
3	password	144,458
4	123456789	94,314
5	12345678	63,769
6	111111	57,210
7	1234567	49,652
8	sunshine	39,118
9	qwerty	37,538
10	654321	33,854
11	000000	32,490
12	password1	30,981
13	abc123	30,398
14	charlie	28,049
15	linked	25,334
16	maggie	23,892
17	michael	23,075
18	666666	22,888
19	princess	22,122
20	123123	21,826
21	iloveyou	20,251
22	1234567890	19,575
23	Linkedin1	19,441
24	daniel	19,184
25	bailey	18,805
26	welcome	18,504
27	buster	18,395
28	Passw0rd	18,208
29	baseball	17,858
30	shadow	17,781
31	121212	17,134
32	hannah	17,040
33	monkey	16,958
34	thomas	16,789
35	summer	16,652
36	george	16,620
37	harley	16,275
38	222222	16,165
39	jessica	16,088
40	GINGER	16,040
41	michelle	16,024
42	abcdef	15,938
43	sophie	15,884
44	jordan	15,839
45	freedom	15,793
46	555555	15,664
47	tigger	15,658
48	joshua	15,628
49	pepper	15,610

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The massive LinkedIn hack proves that people are absolutely awful at picking passwords

NOW WATCH: This smart earpiece translates languages as they are spoken