by Tim Lemieux

Gizmodo has an article on the 25 most popular passwords of 2014, based on compiling millions of stolen passwords made public throughout the year. Many of them are the same unsecure passwords that appeared on the 2013 list. Clearly the public is still going for “easy to remember” rather than “safe and secure”.

Here is the list:

  1. 123456
  2. password
  3. 12345
  4. 12345678
  5. qwerty
  6. 123456789
  7. 1234
  8. baseball
  9. dragon
  10. football
  11. 1234567
  12. monkey
  13. letmein
  14. abc123
  15. 111111
  16. mustang
  17. access
  18. shadow
  19. master
  20. michael
  21. superman
  22. 696969
  23. 123123
  24. batman
  25. trustno1

These passwords are a hackers dream. Many could be guessed in one try, and others would take no time to figure out using software that does “brute force” attacks (trying thousands of sequences of words and letters in minutes). To learn more about how to create passwords that are harder to crack, see Keeping Your Passwords Strong and Secure from the December 2013 issue of LAWPRO Magazine.