

The second-most popular used year was 1987 at 8.4 million, and the third was 1991 at nearly 8.3 million. The year in which the password was createdįrom our analysis, we see that the most popular year was 2010, with nearly 10 million versions of this year used in passwords. Making a rough assumption, people may generally use years in their passwords to mark: One of the most interesting things is when we looked at which years from 1900-2020 were the most used by people when they made passwords. These right here are some of the most common things used in passwords – if you use something like this in your own combinations, you might want to think twice. But that doesn't make the password unique: actually, it's quite the opposite!ĭuring our research, we analyzed over 15 billion entries and separated them into different categories and terms. In order to create simple, memorable combinations for their websites, many people choose to connect them to something that they can easily recall.


We could even deduce the probable age of the person by looking at which year they use in their password. We discovered some interesting things about the way that people create passwords: their favorite sports teams, cities, food and even curse words. We then anonymized the data and detached the passwords so that we could look at that data in isolation and find the most popular passwords and phrases used. We collected data from publicly leaked data breaches, including the Breach Compilation, Collection #1-5, and other databases. T he CyberNews Investigation team was interested in what kind of most common password patterns everyday people were using in creating their own passwords. How we collected the most common passwords? What all of them have in common is their predictability. There are a few lists documenting the most commonly used passwords – all of them based on different studies. Despite security experts recommending using strong and unique passwords, along with two-factor authentication and password managers for more security, people continue using the weak codes that even a beginner cybercriminal could hack in a couple of moments.
