Years pass, but there is a habit that millions of users around the world still cannot overcome: that of having passwords with a poor level of security. According to the usual report drawn up by the password manager NordPass in collaboration with NordStellar, a platform that deals with cybersecurity, once again the very banal “123456“, key to accessing the top of the rankings for 5 of the last 6 years
This elementary numerical sequence is therefore once again the most used globally, far surpassing the queen of banalities, namely “password“, the only one who managed to oust her from the top step of the podium in 2022 and who this year instead finds herself in fourth place.
Confirming the lack of originality of the users and the very low level of protection chosen to protect their accounts on the most popular websites and social networks in the world, in the second and third places we find two other numerical sequences along the lines of the preferred one, namely say “123456789” and “12345678” respectively.
It forcefully enters the top ten, and it is certainly not an absolute surprise in the approval ranking, even the classicqwerty“, and it does so with two different variants, placed in the fifth and sixth place in the list, namely “qwerty123” and “qwerty1” respectively. This is followed by a string of numeric and alphanumeric codes which to define as trivial is an understatement, such as for example the more than intuitive “111111” or “abc123”, but the sequence “@@@@@@ is not bad either. The element that all these choices have in common is the need to find a password quickly and easily to remember, even better if the same for multiple accounts, with all due respect to network security.
Going beyond these rigid sequences of symbols, letters or numbers, among the most common passwords you can also find the very popular “iloveyou” or its counterpart “fuckyou”, without talking about all those words derived from users’ love for a brand or some character from the cinema or animated series: for example “pokemon”, “minecraft”, “naruto” or “samsung”. Other access codes are strictly connected to the country in which they are used, as happens for example in England for “liverpool” or “chelsea”: the world of football forcefully enters the rankings, as we will see shortly. , even in our country.
Even in ItalyUnfortunately, the banal fair is confirmed, so in the top ten we find a large number of access codes already seen globally: “123456” stands at the top of the ranking, and in addition to it we also find “123456789” and ” 12345678″ (in 3rd and 4th place), “password” (in 5th place), “qwerty1”, “qwerty123” and “qwerty” (in 7th, 8th and 10th place respectively) . Among the top ten in our country there is also “juventus” in sixth place and “francesco” in ninth, evidently one of the most loved names in the country.
According to the NordPass report, around half of passwords are currently made up of banal and intuitive sequences of numbers and letters, which make profiles and accounts easily “open” by cybercriminals: as many as 78% of the most used access codes in the world they can be decrypted in less than a second, and what’s worse is that this percentage has increased compared to last year.
But then how can you best defend yourself online? Certainly going in the opposite direction compared to the majority of users: here are some tips to follow to protect our accounts, provided directly by NordPass corporate product manager Karolis Arbaciauskas.
The first step is to create very long access keys and complex. You need a minimum of 20 characters, which must include numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters as well as special symbols. You can also think of using a passphrase but only if it is made up of words selected at random, without any logical connection.
Obviously the second suggestion is to never use the same password for more than one online service: the risk is that a single cyber attack could compromise multiple accounts.
Wherever possible, it is always advisable to adopt passkeya method that is becoming increasingly popular and guarantees greater levels of security: many of the best-known service providers, such as Microsoft and Google, now support this technology.
For how long
concerns companies, given the greater risks, it may be better to rely on password managers, and choose to activate a multi-factor authentication system to increase the security level of your systems.