Worst passwords in the world

The recent targeted attack on iCloud users, which led to the release of nude celebrity photos, was partly successful because of weak passwords.

Apple said in a statement that celebrity accounts were “compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords, and security questions”.

The Apple statement suggested that easy-to-guess passwords were to blame in some of the cases where celebrity accounts were hacked.

Weak passwords are often to blame when hackers gain access to password protected services, which raises the question: which passwords should you avoid using?

Common passwords not to use

It is speculated that iBrute was used to hack into the aforementioned iCloud accounts. This service uses 500 of the most popular passwords globally, which were leaked by RockYou.

The ten most common passwords on the RockYou list are as follows:

Password1
Princess1
[email protected]
Passw0rd
Michael1
Blink182
!QAZ2wsx
Charlie1
Anthony1
1qaz!QAZ

The RockYou password list is only one of many compilations of the most common passwords in the world.

Trustwave also produced a recent list of passwords to avoid, where it used Active Directory environments to gather hashed passwords which they set out to crack.

By using a simple dictionary attack, they recovered 53.97 percent of passwords within just a few minutes.

“Such a short cracking time using a word list from last year’s study shows that passwords were as predictable as ever,” Trustwave said.

The ten most common passwords from the Trustwave experiment are listed below.