After a major data breach at Yahoo revealed more than 400,000 of its users passwords to the public, one software designer decided to see what passwords were most common.
Adam Caudill, a software developer who runs a blog on tech security, conducted an analysis on the revealed Yahoo passwords and found that the following were the top ten most commonly used. (via Business Insider)
- 123456
- password
- welcome
- ninja
- abc123
- 123456789
- 12345678
- sunshine
- princess
- qwerty
As Business Insider notes, many of these are the same passwords we see in all “worst password” or “most common password” lists. Although Yahoo users seem to enjoy ninjas, sunshine and princesses for some reason, it is troubling that people, in 2012, continue to use passwords that could be cracked by the most rudimentary software.
Digging deeper into Caudill’s analysis, we see that one-third of the passwords (146,488) use only lowercase letters. Contrast that to the less than 1% of people (3,345) whose passwords contained lowercase and capital letters, number(s) and symbol(s).