Stop using these terrible, terrible passwords

By

Fraudster steals $16k from victim posing as Apple tech support
“Can you believe this guy’s bank password is ‘password’? I love idiots.”
Photo: Donald Tong/Pexels CC

You lock your house, right? And your car? It’s equally important to lock your data with a secure password. But year after year people insist on using the same easily-guessed passcodes.

The list of “Worst Passwords of 2018” is out, and if your favorite is on there you really need to change it to something more secure.

SplashData created this list from more than 5 million passcodes leaked on the Internet this year.

And the losers are…

In a trend that must make hackers giggle with glee, the top 7 items on the list are almost unchanged from last year. Most of these are “123456” plus very slight numerical variations, along with the stupidly uncreative “password.”

Appearing on the list for the first time is “donald” for obvious reasons. “Sorry, Mr. President, but this is not fake news – using your name or any common name as a password is a dangerous decision,” said Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData. 

Other new words appearing on the list include sunshine, princess, and charlie. 

“Hackers have great success using celebrity names, terms from pop culture and sports, and simple keyboard patterns to break into accounts online because they know so many people are using those easy-to-remember combinations,” said Slain.

Apple users have better options

There’s no reason for any iPhone, Mac, or iPad owner to use these awful passcodes. Safari on all these platforms has a password manager built right in. It can suggest strong passwords and them remember them for you. Thereafter, all that’s required to call up the strong passcode is Face ID or Touch ID and the code will auto-fill.

iOS 12 even extends this capability to third-party applications.

Worst Passwords of 2018

  1. 123456    (Rank unchanged from last year) 
  2. password    (Unchanged) 
  3. 123456789 (Up 3) 
  4. 12345678 (Down 1) 
  5. 12345 (Unchanged) 
  6. 111111 (New) 
  7. 1234567 (Up 1) 
  8. sunshine (New) 
  9. qwerty (Down 5) 
  10. iloveyou (Unchanged) 
  11. princess (New) 
  12. admin (Down 1) 
  13. welcome (Down 1) 
  14.  666666 (New) 
  15. abc123 (Unchanged) 
  16. football (Down 7) 
  17. 123123 (Unchanged) 
  18. monkey (Down 5) 
  19. 654321 (New) 
  20. !@#$%^&* (New) 
  21. charlie (New) 
  22.  aa123456 (New) 
  23. donald (New) 
  24. password1 (New) 
  25. qwerty123 (New)

Source: SplashData

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.