A large internet site called RockYou.com was hacked last year and millions of usernames and passwords were made public. An internet security firm called Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC) analyzed and published the most commonly used passwords.
The commonly used passwords are the simplest ones. This isn’t brain surgery, but here are the top 20 passwords that you shouldn’t use:
| Password | Number of Users | |
| 123456 | 290731 | |
| 12345 | 79078 | |
| 123456789 | 76790 | |
| Password | 76790 | |
| iloveyou | 51622 | |
| princess | 35231 | |
| rockyou | 22588 | |
| 1234567 | 21726 | |
| 12345678 | 20553 | |
| abc123 | 17542 | |
| Nicole | 17168 | |
| Daniel | 16409 | |
| babygirl | 16094 | |
| monkey | 15294 | |
| Jessica | 15162 | |
| Lovely | 14950 | |
| michael | 14898 | |
| Ashley | 14329 | |
| 654321 | 13984 | |
| Qwerty | 13856 |
Thank God that “mypassword” wasn’t on this list, so I must be safe!
The pickings look so easy for hackers that if you have at least some level of complexity in your password, most hackers will probably just look elsewhere.
One suggestion from tomshardware.com is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like “This little piggy went to market” might become “tlpWENT2m”. That nine-character password won’t be in anyone’s dictionary.”
I wonder how many people are going to use “tlpWENT2m” as a password now.
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