Passwords to avoid

Mark Burnett, studied thousands of people for his book "Perfect Passwords" (available at Amazon) and he compiled a list of the 500 most common passwords.

Looking at the list then you soon realise that most people like:-

• Simple - As the most popular passwords follow simple patterns on the keyboard. Even No. 8 "qwerty" and No. 271 "qazwsx" fall into this category
• Only one thing - There are a lot of rude words in the list, but that is to be expected really.
• Sport and Cars - You could even say that the people studdied were mainly american, as the top car name is mustang, while the top sport is baseball.
• Buffs - As you have passwords like :-
  
  
  • "ncc1701" The ship number for the Starship Enterprise
  • "thx1138" The name of George Lucas’s first movie, a 1971 remake of an earlier student project
  • "ou812" The title of a 1988 Van Halen album
  • "8675309" The number mentioned in the 1982 Tommy Tutone song. The song supposedly caused an epidemic of people dialing 867- 5309 and asking for "Jenny"

"…Approximately one out of every nine people uses at least one password on the list shown below. And one out of every 50 people uses one of the top 20 worst passwords.."

So if you have a password in this list read our article Making a secure password and change your password today. 

Note: Please remember that these passwords are what people used - we did not pick these. Some of the words are rude and we have "splatted" the worst of those with asterisks. This list is intended to help you avoid 500 passwords that hackers are guaranteed to try out - rude ones included.