It baffles my mind that most people in developed nations have tons of experience with the Internet at this point, and yet many of them still don’t take online security seriously. According to SplashData’s annual ranking of the worst passwords in North America and Western Europe, the most commonly used passwords of 2015 were just as abysmal as they have been for last several years, and it’s a little depressing to see how crappy the passwords are.
You’d like to think that we humans are getting progressively better at using these computer things as the years pass. But a quick scan through 2015′s list of most commonly used passwords will smash and set fire to that bit of optimistic thinking. For a fifth straight year, the secure phrases “123456” and “password” were the most-used and second-most-used passwords by Interneters in North America and Western Europe, according to SplashData’s annual “Worst Passwords” ranking. The company, which develops password management software, uses aggregations of leaked passwords as sample sizes to determine the most popular security phrases in circulation. Though “123456” and “password” have been the most abundant among the millions of leaked passwords analyzed yearly by SplashData since 2011, security expert and author Mike Burkett (who’s collaborated with the company on its annual lists) has had the passphrases marked as No. 1 and 2 on his “Worst Passwords of All Time” list since 2005.
