SplashData, a password management company headquartered in Los Gatos, CA, has released their top 25 most-hacked passwords from 2015 – do you use any of these? If you do, you should change them immediately, according to Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData. You should change them to avoid major damage to your personal records.

Says Slain, “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.”

This is the fifth year that SplashData has posted this list of loser passwords, and amazingly, the same passwords keep appearing – for instance, “123456”, and “password”, which indicates that folks are not catching on very quickly in the English-speaking world.

The following is the 2015 SplashData List of Most-Hacked Passwords, culled from some 2 million leaked passwords shared by online hackers:

• 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. qwertyviop
• 23. solo
• 24. passw0rd
• 25. starwars

Notice that longer words have been added – not necessarily safer – and that Star Wars has impacted people’s choices, as in #21, #23, and #25. Says Slain of SpashData, “We have seen an effort by many people to be more secure by adding characters to passwords, but if these longer passwords are based on simple patterns, they will put you in as much risk of having your identity stolen by hackers.”

Here are 3 tips from SplashData to help us protect ourselves online:

1. Use passwords of 12 characters or more, using a mix of letters and numbers.
2. Avoid using the same password over and over again on different websites.
3. Use a password manager such as TeamsID to organize and protect passwords.

One thing is clear from this list of most-hacked passwords, with the same two words still occupying the number 1 & 2 spots: Not everyone is making the effort to protect themselves.

Says SplashData, “Until all passwords are replaced with fingerprint readers, or facial or voice recognition, good passwords should include at least 12 characters with combinations of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters.” By that, they do not mean “password”, “football”, or abc123.

About the Author

Carol Blair Vaughn holds a Master’s Degree in Performing Arts and is a retired college professor from Washington, D.C. She inherited her love for Latin America from her father, the former U.S. Ambassador
to Colombia, Panama, and Director of the Peace Corps, Jack Vaughn. Carol writes for the Association of Residents of Costa Rica (ARCR) and for an English language club in the southern region of Costa Rica. In the past, Carol served as Editor in Chief of What’s on Tap magazine.