You need a password to access just about anything on a computer today: your bank account, your email, your resources here at KUMC. So it's important that we choose long and strong passwords to protect our information. If we don't, the odds that someone can guess our password and get access increase exponentially.
SplashData has just released the results of their annual study on the 25 Most Popular Passwords and, while there are several familiar passwords on the list from last year - "password", "123456", and "12345678" - there are some surprising new additions as well. Take a look and, hopefully, you don't see your password on the list (And, if you do, it's time to change it to something more complex!)
Here's the full list, along with how the popularity of the phrase has increased or decreased in the past year:
1. password (Unchanged)
2, 123456 (Unchanged)
3. 12345678 (Unchanged)
4. abc123 (Up 1)
5. qwerty (Down 1)
6. monkey (Unchanged)
7. letmein (Up 1)
8. dragon (Up 2)
9. 111111 (Up 3)
10. baseball (Up 1)
11. iloveyou (Up 2)
12. trustno1 (Down 3)
13. 1234567 (Down 6)
14. sunshine (Up 1)
15. master (Down 1)
16. 123123 (Up 4)
17. welcome (New)
18. shadow (Up 1)
19. ashley (Down 3)
20. football (Up 5)
21. jesus (New)
22. michael (Up 2)
23. ninja (New)
24. mustang (New)
25. password1 (New)
