The worst passwords of 2023 are also the most common, "123456" comes in first

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 244 points – The worst passwords of 2023 are also the most common, "123456" comes in first
techspot.com

The worst passwords of 2023 are also the most common, "123456" comes in first::undefined

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only one – "theworldinyourhand" – is virtually uncrackable. It is the number 173 most common password and would take centuries to guess using brute force.

Not anymore. That would get moved towards the top of the rainbow table now.

Pass phrases for the passwords you have to type by hand, automatically generated passwords for the things that can autofill from a password manager, MFA for everything that supports it.

Anything less or any password reuse is just asking for trouble.

Yeah, using a pass phrase makes it much easier to remember on top of being more secure. But users should introduce at least a bit more complexity than that example (all lower case letters isn't great). This1sComplexButMemorable! Is an easy example of how you can just make up a relevant sentence to what you're using, include a range of character types for complexity and to meet requirements, and you're good to go. Plus if you make it relevant to what you're logging into, you're less likely to be tempted to reuse the pass.

ThisIsMyMotherfuckingHotmailPassword!

Is an incredibly secure password for Hotmail. And super memorable.

Handing the security of your accounts to...... mobile carriers... always felt iffy to me.

3 more...

That's the kind of password an idiot would use on his luggage!

123456, that's the same password that I have on my luggage! Set a course for druidia and change the password on my luggage

They got this data from password leaks. Crappy sites that force you to create an unnecessary account for basic usage are arguebly more often part of password leaks.

So it's not a surprise that a huge amount of leaked accounts have passwords like 123456, because that's exactly the right kind of password for a throwaway account that you'll never need again. In the best case coupled to a trashmail email account.

Apparently, people creating new accounts seem to assume the word (password) in the box in light gray font is a suggestion rather than a label.

lol

Being the most common makes them inherently the worst, so that shouldn't surprise anyone.

No mention of descending numbers, looks like 654321 is still safe. Not that uh, I, would have any particular worry about that one, nope.

eyes dart back and forth rapidly

Just waiting for the day when they start calling out those of us who make all our passwords easy to type with one hand.

All your passwords, or only the ones for certain websites?

Funny, I thought only I did that. Looks like a boss when you login to a system with just one hand and at lightning fast speeds.

I think most of these are for accounts where people don't care if they are hacked or not.

Regardless, this should not be on the individual. The issue is with the website that allows those types of passwords to begin with. There are sites that don't allow special characters at all. Stupid.

The most infuriating thing is websites that actually limit secure passwords (e.g. "password must be between 6 and 12 characters"). Preventing longer passwords makes little sense if they're salting and hashing; and if they're storing the passwords in plain text (which is just about the only reason to limit the max length to anything less than what a person would reasonably remember), that's even worse.

There was a belief, before the advent of ubiquitous password managers, that allowing passwords to be "too long" would result in people forgetting their password more often, entering it wrong, or some combination which would increase reset requests and ultimately cause people to use worse passwords. Basically "you can't remember a 54 character random password, and you're gonna get pissed and switch to a six character predictable word".

This is now obviously a terrible line of reasoning, but it was only middling bad at the time.

Oh, i guess that makes some sort of sense - obviously I disagree with the conclusion, but I understand it - but it's beyond frustrating when you think "maybe I'll pay this bill online" and see that limit. And even if that is the reasoning for the limit, if they haven't updated their requirements in all that time, I have little faith that they're storing my sensitive information securely.

I feel like most of the sites I’ve seen password limits like this on are financial in nature, where it’s all theatrics - the appearance of security takes precedence over (and in some cases comes at the expense of) actual security.

Exactly, I'm not using a real password for a site I don't care about where I have nothing to protect.

I'm using something simple that I can type with one hand.

Something important however? Good luck figuring that out.

Hey, how did you guess the password on my luggage?

Devs out there:

Everyone knows the correct test credentials are test/test. Even then, that's only if they don't allow blank/no password.

No significant change from the past couple of decades, then.