Britons appear to have little regard for the security of their online accounts, based on new research of the country’s most popular passwords.
While we should really all know better, “password” itself is the top pick nationwide – and slight variations such as “password1” and “password123” are not far behind.
It overtook last year’s “123456” as the nation’s favourite chocolate teapot of website security, according to annual research by password manager company NordPass.
Other common key combinations which feature highly on the list are “qwerty” and “abc123”, while plenty of us are confident enough in our counting skills to take our passwords all the way up to “12345678”.
Names and sports teams are also popular, with Liverpool outperforming their current Premier League ranking in the 2022 password standings.
Here are the top 20:
1. password
2. 123456
3. guest
4. liverpool
5. qwerty
6. arsenal
7. 123456789
8. password1
9. 12345
10. 12345678
11. chelsea
12. charlie
13. abc123
14. liverpool1
15. Parola12
16. football
17. monkey
18. chocolate
19. yuantuo2012
20. letmein
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While this list of passwords may have you shaking your head, there are also signs that we’re getting wiser when it comes to securing our accounts.
NordPass said the sample of passwords available for its research was smaller than usual this year, as more people adopt measures like multifactor authentication.
This is when people choose to sign in to their accounts using authentication apps on their phones, which often now incorporate hardware features like facial recognition, or via text messages and backup email addresses.
“With broader adoption of this technology, passwords are simply losing their value,” said NordPass’ chief product officer Ieva Soblickaite.
“Even if you hack a password, you cannot complete the identity authentication if the user has MFA enabled.”