The most hacked accounts use passwords like - Iloveyou, 12345 and princess

• Millions of users who have had their accounts hacked - use passwords with consecutive numbers from 1-9.
• The most obvious one – “password” – remains popular even now.
• Millions of users were found to be using names of popular men and women as passwords.

Passwords hold the key to our digital life and yet, people don’t seem to take them seriously enough. Hackers keep finding new ways to exploit user accounts with weak passwords, and the non-stop data breaches don’t help either.

That doesn’t seem to prevent people from millions of people from using passwords such as “12345”. Admittedly, we’ve all used similarly terrible passwords at some point, but that’s no excuse to still do it in this day and age.

Why do people still use terrible passwords?

It’s simple. Terrible passwords like “12345”, “11111”, or “123321” are easy to remember. At a time when we have accounts of dozens of services, it can be difficult to remember unique passwords for all the accounts.

In its report for 2019, NordPass notes the top ten worst passwords of 2019 include over 6 million passwords that are made up of consecutive numbers from 1-9.

While those users at least had a string of numbers, over 8,30,000 users simply used “password” as their password.

It’s okay to be lazy sometimes, but that is an absolutely awful idea.

Here are the top ten worst passwords of 2019:

The report also includes some amusing passwords like “iloveyou”, and “princess”. If only love and royalty could prevent your accounts from getting hacked. And 2,94,315 users with these passwords were hacked last year.

A recurring theme in the top 200 worst passwords analysed in the report include popular men and women names, food items and strings of consecutive letters and numbers on a QWERTY keyboard.

If you one of these words as your password, you might want to reset it with a strong one. It is recommended that you use a unique password for each account.

But if you do not want to stress or test your memory, you can also use a password manager to automatically generate and save your passwords. You can use a master password to login to the password manager and stop worrying about remembering dozens of passwords.

Some popular and trusted password managers include 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane and Enpass.

See also:

Google Chrome will now alert you when your password has been stolen

The biggest password flubs of 2019, from Facebook's stolen hard drives to Lisa Kudrow's Instagram

Scammers are using Facebook's 'Notes' feature in a clever trick to fool people into giving up their passwords