The Most Popular Password Is 123456 (Just Like Spaceballs)

PublishedOctober 8, 2009

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I don't know whether to laugh or cry. With the list of 10,000 email passwords that's been making the rounds following Hotmail/Gmail/etc phishing, Bogdan Calin of Acunetix analyzed the data for real-world trends. The results are shamefully funny.

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"123456" was the most popular password, appearing 64 times. Yes, that's but one digit away from this famous Spaceballs clip:

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Other trends? The next top 20 most popular passwords were Spanish names, just under half the population used all lower case letters, and only six percent of the population used an alphanumeric combination.

Also, about 20% of the passwords were only six characters long...though the longest password was the awesome "lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo". [The Inquirer]