Surprisingly 123456 is the Most Common Password of 2016

In this age and day of fast paced internet, most of us are impatient, lazy and have a negligible attention span. But it’s really surprising to find out that a good 17% of users protect their account with the password ‘123456’.

According to a study by Keeper Security, 123456 was the most used password of the year 2016, followed by ‘123456789’ and ‘qwerty’.

Other passwords that made it into the top 10most common passwords of 2016 list in the report were ‘111111’, ‘password’, ‘123123’ and few other such generic numerical passwords.

The report stated, “Website operators must take more responsibility for password security. After years of data breaches due to weak passwords, website operators are still not enforcing password best practices.”

While these kinds of passwords will be laughed upon, nonetheless it’s important to protect your account as well as one can.

“While it’s important for users to be aware of risks, a sizable minority are never going to take the time or effort to protect themselves. IT administrators and website operators must do the job for them,” the report added.

Protecting Personal Accounts is our Own Responsibility

Nothing in the digital world is uncrackable, per se, but an account protected by a strong password could take greater than several years to crack open the account — it’s recommended to change your password every few years at least.

“The bigger responsibility lies with website owners who fail to enforce the most basic password complexity policies. It isn’t hard to do, bu the list makes it clear that many still don’t bother,” Keeper Security noted.

The user of password managers has increased over the past couple of years, but since popular password managers like LastPass can be compromised, it’s best to be your own password vault.

There are a lot of websites that we login to these days and it’s suggested that you should make a different password for your online account.

But it’s not feasible to be able to remember all unique passwords assigned to every one of them. Read our report which talks about a Do It Yourself to be able to manage your passwords without having to use a password manager.

Please note that this method isn’t entirely secure and try it at your own risk.