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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Users Still Using Stupid Awful Passwords

November 18, 2021

Despite being criticized for having weak and easily guessed passwords, users continue to practice deplorable cybersecurity hygiene. Year after year, we lecture about the requirement to have unique, long and non‑dictionary passwords. I suppose we are wasting oxygen as bad passwords are still extremely common today. To support that statement, Gizmodo reported that another list of the worst passwords of 2021 has been recently released. Shocker, but it is still awful.

Each year, NordPass releases a list of the 200 most common passwords used for login credentials. It is amazing that year after year, people still insist on having 123456 as their password. Hopefully, you are not using one of the awful passwords in the list. If you are curious, just jump over to the NordPass site and see the list of awful passwords. You can see the global list or filter it based on a specific country. These are the top 20 worst passwords for the United States, all of which can be cracked in less than one second.

  1. 123456
  2. password
  3. 12345
  4. 123456789
  5. password1
  6. abc123
  7. 12345678
  8. qwerty
  9. 111111
  10. 1234567
  11. 1234
  12. iloveyou
  13. sunshine
  14. monkey
  15. 1234567890
  16. 123123
  17. princess
  18. baseball
  19. dragon
  20. football

To quote Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Yet again, another reason to use a password manager and have strong passwords.

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