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Virginia Tech says that users preferred brand names of pop culture passwords in 2017.
BEACON TRANSCRIPT – It’s that time of the year, folks. As we’ve grown accustomed to, at the end of each year the popular passwords list comes around to show us just how imaginative users are when it comes to online security. This time, the undeniably amusing list was supplied by Virginia Tech and Dashlane, a security company.
A Sneak Peek Into 2017’s Funniest Passwords by Virginia Tech
Sorry to break it you, but 2017’s funniest password is not “12345” or “qwerty.”
According to Dr. Gang Wang of Virginia Tech and the project’s bigwig, last year, users were more inclined to create movie and brands-inspired passwords than football teams or things related to pop culture.
To compile this top, Wang and his cohort employed the help of Dashlane, the security firm which supplied a database of 61 million leaked passwords.
Dr. Wang noted that even though users received their fair share of warnings about password strength or using different passwords for their accounts, it appears that some habits are just too hard to ditch.
As a result, most users either use the same password for all account or slight variations. Wang explained that people often have trouble memorizing passphrases. And given the fact that an average user has around 150 accounts, most are just too lazy to think about this.
And now, for the list. According to Virginia Tech’s research, 2017’s most popular passwords are related to love life, the first three positions being occupied by “iloveyou,” “f***you,” and “a**hole.”
Moving on, we have the ever-popular brand-inspired passcodes such as “myspace,” “snickers,” “playboy” or “skittles.”
Under pop culture, we have “metallica,” “rockstar,” “nirvana,” “pokemon” and others. Last but not least, we have football-inspired passwords, the most popular being “livepool” and “chelsea.”
You can read the full list of amusing passwords on Dashlane’s blog.
Image source: Pixabay
