Password management provider SplashData has released its annual list of the 25 worst passwords that you should never use. It gets the data from more than five million passwords leaked over the year, mostly in North America and Western Europe. Although it's crazy to believe people are still using them, "123456" and "password" and variations on them still figure heavily in the list, with "123456" being the worst password in 2016, meaning it was the easiest to guess and to breach. Other popular words that appear annually on the list are "football" and "princess," while some of the new words this year are "hottie," "flower," "sunshine" and "loveme." Also on the list is "zaq1zaq1," which looks strange, but is the series of keys on the left column of the keyboard. SplashData advises that people make sure their passwords have more than eight characters, combine letters and numbers, and don't have simple or repeating patterns. The 2016 list:
- 123456
- password
- 12345
- 12345678
- football
- qwerty
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- princess
- 1234
- login
- welcome
- solo
- abc123
- admin
- 121212
- flower
- passw0rd
- dragon
- sunshine
- master
- hottie
- loveme
- zaq1zaq1
- password1