The Worst Passwords of 2019 Confirm Dumb People Still Use the Internet

Microsoft and others keep insisting for a password-less future, and it’s all for good reason: passwords are no longer enough to protect us, and alternative methods, such as biometric authentication, could better defend our data against the continuously-evolving threats.

But at the same time, a world without passwords could come with a series of benefits aimed at those people who still ignore the most basic security recommendations and instead of choosing complex phrases that are hard to guess, they still go for dumb choices like “1234” to protect even very sensitive information like names and addresses.

These are the people who most often come online after a data breach to complain that Internet companies suck big time because hackers broke into their accounts.

Unfortunately for the WWW, new figures provided by SplashData confirm that the elevator really doesn’t go to the top floor for way too many Internet users.

“biteme” drops to position 49

So it doesn’t really come as a big surprise that the worst password used this year continues to be “123456,” which is pretty much the first password that the majority of hackers or script kiddies try when attempting to break into an account belonging to someone else

Looking at the chart below confirms that repeating and sequential numbers remain people’s favorite choices when it comes to choosing a password to protect their data.

The somewhat good news is that “password1” is now ranked 22nd in the charts, while “donald" is down to position 34. Fewer people think they’re smarter than hackers and instead of 12345678 choose “!@#$%^&*,” so this combination is only the 39th in the list.

Below are the top 10 worst passwords this year, and look further in the box for the rest of the chart.