Passwords are paramount to creating certain that your information stays personal and safe. Nevertheless, the dangers of a weak password might imply a severe information breach, with a mean information breach in 2024 costing $4.88 million, which is a ten% improve from 2023. As 2025 unfolds, you will need to make sure that your passwords are usually not inside fashionable lists and will be trusted to maintain your information protected.
Right here at KnownHost, we carried out a research to analyze essentially the most used passwords and the way doubtless they’re to be hacked primarily based on what number of instances the password has been seen in recorded information breaches.
Most Hackable Passwords
From the desk, we will see that the highest 5 most hackable passwords have a mixture of consecutive numbers from 1 to 9, the primary of which is ‘123456’. This password has been used over 3 million instances and has been concerned in over 50 million information breaches. That is considerably greater than second place, with ‘123456789’ which has been used 1.6 million instances and concerned in 20.5 million information breaches. In third, ‘1234’ has ranked extremely because of the size of solely 4 characters. This password will also be cracked in lower than a second, together with the opposite passwords included within the high ten.
Probably the most hackable letter password is ‘password’ in sixth place, which has been used 692,000 instances and been concerned in 11 million information breaches, the third highest throughout the highest 10. That is adopted by ‘admin’ in eighth place which has been used practically 250,000 instances and has been concerned in practically 5 million information breaches.
In 10th place is the one mixture password of letters and numbers with ‘abc123’ which has been used 331,000 instances and concerned in 4.2 million information breaches.
Most Frequent Password Patterns
Throughout the 200 passwords used on this research, the password sequences solely include letters and numbers, both solely or a mixture of each. Notably, not one of the passwords embody particular characters. 65.5% of all the worldwide high 200 passwords are a mixture of each, adopted by solely letters with 23.5% after which solely numbers with 11% of all passwords.
From this, we will see that mixtures are the almost certainly passwords for use globally, while solely numbers are the almost certainly to be concerned in information breaches.
Most Frequent Password Lengths
The character size for the worldwide high 200 passwords varies between 4 characters to fifteen characters, with the commonest being eight characters lengthy with 20.5% of all passwords ranked. The least widespread size was the shortest with 4, with solely 0.5% throughout all passwords.
Methodology
For this research, the highest 200 passwords used worldwide have been seeded from NordPass. These have been then loaded into PwnedPwnedPwned to examine the frequency of those passwords being hacked, with information breach information spanning from 2007 to 2025. From this, the passwords have been then standardized utilizing minmax normalisation. The minmax normalisation worth is multiplied by 10 to create a rating (between 1-10). A rating of 10 is at all times the very best consequence and this was used to seek out the brand new rating for essentially the most hacked passwords throughout the globe.
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