Top Passwords in 2024

NordPass released their annual report of commonly used passwords again.

Feature Image Attribution (Grok 3 beta)

Top 10 Passwords

For the second straight year, “123456” is the most commonly used password globally by a lot. It doesn’t get much better as you work down the list. NordPass 2024 Top 200 Passwords.

Rank	Password	Time to Crack	Count
1	123456	< 1 second	3,018,050
2	123456789	< 1 second	1,625,135
3	12345678	< 1 second	884,740
4	password	< 1 second	692,151
5	qwerty123	< 1 second	642,638
6	qwerty1	< 1 second	583,630
7	111111	< 1 second	459,730
8	12345	< 1 second	395,573
9	secret	< 1 second	363,491
10	123123	< 1 second	351,576

Note the time to crack the 10 most commonly used passwords is under one second. That’s with typical hardware that anyone can buy – not anything fancy. It’s that easy.

If you filter by country you’ll notice words that mean “password” in their dialect. Example in Romanian:

Password Methodology

Per the report:

…reviewed and analyzed a 2.5TB database extracted from various publicly available sources, including those on the dark web.

That’s an impressive sample size of leaked passwords! 2.5TB of text must be huge – and that may have been the compressed size.

Findings

The report gives a few key findings:

Somehow “123456” has consistently won first place
Corporate passwords are in alignment with personal passwords. This is what password reuse does and why it is so bad.
After 6 years of reporting the situation hasn’t really improved.

Conclusion

Weak passwords are a people problem – not a technical problem. The solutions have been around for a long time. Password managers are the best way for the vast majority of people online to manage their credentials.

In the end, “it’s not a hack, it’s barely social engineering. It’s more like natural selection”.

(Video NSFW – language)