Worst Passwords of 2015: ‘Star Wars’ Terms Make SplashData’s List

Jan 19, 2016Uncategorized0 comments

Apparently a lot of folks don’t realize that The Force won’t be able to protect your data.

Popular “Star Wars”-related terms such as “starwars,” “solo” and “princess” were new entries on the annual “Worst Passwords” list compiled by password management applications company SplashData.

“Star Wars” terms aside, the 2015 list wasn’t all that different from 2014 and years prior. “123456” and “password” once again were the most commonly used passwords, as they have been since SplashData’s first list in 2011. People apparently liked numbers that were easy to remember: Six of the top 10 passwords for 2015 were simple numerical sequences (“1234,” “12345,” “123456” and so on).

Some new and longer passwords debuted on the 2015 list, but the longer passwords are so simple that their extra length is “virtually worthless as a security measure,” SplashData said.

“We have seen an effort by many people to be more secure by adding characters to passwords, but if these longer passwords are based on simple patterns they will put you in just as much risk of having your identity stolen by hackers,” Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData, said in a statement.

“As we see on the list, using common sports and pop culture terms is also a bad idea. We hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will take steps to strengthen their passwords and, most importantly, use different passwords for different websites.”

 

Here is SplashData’s Top 25 “Worst Passwords of 2015”:

 

123456

password

12345678

qwerty

12345

123456789

football

1234

1234567

baseball

welcome

1234567890

abc123

111111

1qaz2wsx

dragon

master

monkey

letmein

login

princess

qwertyuiop

solo

passw0rd

starwars

 

From a post by James Eng for nbcnews.com

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