A recent Splashdata news released shared the 25 worst passwords to use in 2012 (these are the most commonly used passwords exposed by hackers this year).
The words “password”, “123456” and “12345678” are popular this year and were popular last year too. New entrants (in the 2012 list) include “welcome”, “jesus”,”ninja”, ”mustang” and “password1”.
- password (Unchanged)
- 123456 (Unchanged)
- 12345678 (Unchanged)
- abc123 (Up 1)
- qwerty (Down 1)
- monkey (Unchanged)
- letmein (Up 1)
- dragon (Up 2)
- 111111 (Up 3)
- baseball (Up 1)
- iloveyou (Up 2)
- trustno1 (Down 3)
- 1234567 (Down 6)
- sunshine (Up 1)
- master (Down 1)
- 123123 (Up 4)
- welcome (New)
- shadow (Up 1)
- ashley (Down 3)
- football (Up 5)
- jesus (New)
- michael (Up 2)
- ninja (New)
- mustang (New)
- password1 (New)
If you use any of these, change it now. Each site should have its own password. Each password should be at least 8 characters, made up of uppercase & lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.