This Is The World's Worst Password In 2021 NordPass Version

Passwords should be set differently for your multiple accounts. (photo credit: pixabay)

JAKARTA – NordPass has released a list of the most common passwords of 2021, revealing some of the most insecure passwords used by people around the world.

Despite the many warnings from cybersecurity experts about using common and easy-to-guess passwords, the annual bad password list continues to include some of the same suspects every year. It's a bewildering trend, especially with the exponential increase in cybercrime during the pandemic.

With hackers becoming more and more active these days, cybersecurity experts recommend using strong passwords to prevent unwanted incidents. Cybersecurity experts recommend that a strong password should include at least 12 characters, including varying combinations of upper and lower case letters.

They should also include numbers and symbols to make passwords more complex and harder to crack. Experts also warn against using the same password for multiple accounts, so one leaked password doesn't necessarily result in all accounts being compromised.

According to a list published by NordPass, the most common password globally is "123456", followed by "password". The study also revealed that both men and women were equally bad at creating strong passwords, with "123456789," "abc123," and "password1" being some of the other top ten entrants for both sexes in the United States.

Globally, other gem finds were passwords that included "11111," "123123," and "qwerty," all of which took less than 1 second to crack with a simple brute force attack.

Research also revealed that Ferrari and Porsche were the most popular car brands chosen as bad passwords, while "dolphin" was the most widely used animal-related password in many countries.

While many bad passwords are the same for men and women, this list also shows some significant differences. While women seem to prefer fun passwords like "sunshine," "iloveyou," and "princess," men typically prefer sports terms like "baseball" and "football," as well as comic book superheroes like "superman."

Some other terms used by men include "dragon", "killer", and some obscenities. The same trend holds true for England, where men choose the names of their favorite football teams, such as "liverpool1," "chelsea" and "arsenal" as their passwords. Women in the UK, meanwhile, chose "chocolate" as one of their favorite bad passwords.

The research also highlights which countries have leaked the most passwords over the past year. Russia tops the list with a total of 2,867,917,611 during 2021, which is an alarming 19.90 per capita.

The United States experienced 1,699,435,286 leaks, which is 5.15 per capita. Despite being significantly lower than Russia, password leaks per capita are still on the higher side compared to most other western countries.

Well, could you be one of those bad password users? If so, then it's time for you to change your password to something more complex but easy to remember.