NordPass Reveals the Worst Passwords of 2021: Is Yours One of Them?

Are you using a bad password? Here's how you can better improve your online security.

Once again, as the primary keeper of online security and privacy, passwords are under scrutiny. Since the definition of a weak password keeps evolving, NordPass has revealed the 200 worst passwords most commonly used in 2021.

Is yours one of them? These are the passwords you need to avoid to protect your online security better.

What Makes a Bad Password?

There are a few shared characteristics between poor passwords that put your online security at risk. For one, any password that's shorter than eight characters, a word from the dictionary—regardless of language—and doesn't contain a mix of symbols, characters, and numbers is a weak password.

For more specific cases, your password also shouldn't be anything related to your personal life, such as family members and friends, pets, birthday, email, and phone number.

The Worst Passwords of 2021

The rules look pretty simple. But according to NordPass, the most common passwords break almost all the rules. The top 10 most used passwords in 2021 are:

• 123456
• 123456789
• 12345
• qwerty
• password
• 12345678
• 111111
• 1234567890
• 1234567

As you might've noticed, the list lacks diversity. When creating a password, most people go straight to numbers, and half of them are under eight characters long. In fact, those ten passwords are used just under 300 million times.

According to NordPass, all those passwords took less than one second to crack.

However, having a strong password doesn't mean that it's unique. For example, you can find "1g2w3e4r" and "gwerty123" in the list even if they both have eight characters or longer, don't contain real words, and have a combination of numbers and letters.

Nevertheless, it still took the company at least three hours to crack this set of passwords.

Learning From Other People's Mistakes

You can take your password security even further by including special characters and upper case letters. But the more secure the password, the harder it is to remember. Luckily, password managers can keep even the most complex of passwords for you.

And to further enhance your online security, you can employ Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) as an additional safety line if one of your passwords fail.

About The Author