by Samara Lynn

January 25, 2016

The Worst Passwords of 2015

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People are still not realizing the importance of creating secure and complex passwords. TeamsID, a company that offers secure password management solutions, released its list of the worst, most-used passwords in 2015.

[Congresswoman Jackson Lee, ICMCP on Need for Diversity in Cybersecurity]

How does TeamsID collect this data? According to the company’s blog post, they perform a search of public posts or “dumps” of plain text (versus encrypted text) posted on a large selection of Websites. They searched through over 2 million passwords. Most of these discovered passwords are from hacks and security breaches of actual people’s accounts. The company has been creating a list of worst passwords since 2011.

These weak, commonly-used passwords are important to know. They are quite easy for hackers to comprise and using them puts your data and any app or service you sign into online, at risk.

Without further ado, the worst passwords last year were:

Rank:   Password:

1           123456

2          password

3          12345678

4          qwerty

5          12345

6          123456789

7          football

8          1234

9          1234567

10        baseball

11         welcome

12         1234567890

13         abc123

14        111111

15         1qaz2wsx

16        dragon

17         master

18        monkey

19        letmein

20        login

21         princess

22        qwertyuiop

23        solo

24        passw0rd

25        starwars

If you are using any of these passwords, change them….now! Using password managers such as Dashlane or TeamsID’s SplashID product for consumers, are great ways to manage the many passwords that are required for online activity. TeamsID also recommends using different passwords for different sites and apps–a task that is made easier with password management software.

Be sure to check the February edition of Black Enterprise magazine for more tips on how to create strong passwords.