Opinion: I hope you don’t see your passwords on this list

You might see this warning if your password has been found in a leak. — Jim Rossman/TNS

Passwords – we all use them, and I think we can agree they are a pain in the neck.

VPN company NordPass, in conjunction with NordStellar, has published its sixth annual list of the Top 200 Most Common Passwords.

Trust me when I say, you don’t want to find any of your passwords on this list.

Here are the top 10 personal passwords from the United States:

1. secret
2. 123456
3. password
4. qwerty123
5. qwerty1
6. 123456789
7. password1
8. 12345678
9. 12345
10. abc123

This year they’ve also published an additional list of the Top 200 Corporate Passwords. Here are the top 10 from the United States:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty123
4. qwerty1
5. aaron431
6. password1
7. welcome
8. 12345678
9. password1
10. abc123

Those corporate passwords would never be allowed at my workplace, nor would they be allowed if there were any kind of decent password requirements. Typically, passwords should be more than 8 characters with both capital and lower-case letters, at least one number and one special character.

Where I work passwords are at least 12 characters, and I log into a few secure systems that require passwords that have more than 20 characters.

Some random entries from the Top 200 list (and their rank) include: q1w2e3r4t5y61 (62), Abcd@1234 (72), Nicole (77), Anthony (107), batman (136) and 000000000 (149).

The passwords were found in a 2.5 terabyte database extracted from various publicly available sources, including the dark web.

If you’d like to see the entire list, go to https://nordpass.com/most-common-passwords-list. – Tribune News Service