Guessing Worst Online Password as Easy as 123

Published February 05, 2015

If your password is "123456" it's time for a change—it has been named as the worst password of 2013, overtaking "password" as the most common password for the first time, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Others in the list of least secure passwords released by security firm Splashdata include "qwerty," "12345678," "abc123," "iloveyou," along with common words including "princess" and "shadow." "Password" moved into the No. 2 slot largely because of a huge security breach at Adobe that revealed millions of passwords, with "123456" the most common among them, PC World notes.

"As always, we hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites," says the chief exec of Splashdata, which advises people to create secure passwords by several random words separated by spaces or underscores.

(Or read about one novel replacement for passwords: a pulse-checking wristband.)