Photograph by Jeroen Bennink
No matter how many times companies prompt users to make more secure passwords, and how often the media carries stories of people getting hacked, the public still refuses to move away from extremely guessable options.
In October Adobe reported that a major breach of their servers took place, with 150 million account usernames and passwords believed to be compromised, and with copies of the data exposed in that breach now online researchers are beginning to analyse people’s choice of passwords.
Security researcher Jeremi Gosney investigated the data to find out the most common passwords used by Adobe users, and the results are depressing with 123456 the most common password used followed by the similarly inventive “123456789” and “password”.
Whilst most would understand that these passwords are the definition of insecure, the size of breach suffered by Adobe will mean that the passwords that everyone signed up to the service will now be inherently insecure in the future, as this list may well provide the first tried in any future hacking attempt.
Top 20 Most Common Passwords
- 123456
- 123456789
- password
- adobe123
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 1234567
- 111111
- photoshop
- 123123
- 1234567890
- 000000
- abc123
- 1234
- adobe1
- macromedia
- azerty
- iloveyou
- aaaaaa
- 654321
