The massive LinkedIn hack proves that people are absolutely awful at picking passwords

Advertisement

woman sad great britain sport facepalm crying unhappy stephanie houghton football

Julian Finney/Getty Images

:(

Advertisement

We know that people are awful at picking passwords - and the huge hack of LinkedIn confirms it.

The professional social network was breached back in 2012, but it has come back into the news this week as we finally learned the true scale of it: A whopping 167 million accounts were compromised, including 117 million passwords.

Complimentary Tech Event
Transform talent with learning that works
Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

The passwords were hashed - encrypting hem so that they can't be read - but researchers at LeakedSource have been able to decrypt them. Their findings show just how much the same passwords get used over and over (and over and over and over and over) again.

(We first saw the LeakedSource data over on ZDNet.)

Advertisement

The single most popular password? 123456. That was used by more than 750,000 accounts. In number two is the unimaginative "linkedin" (172,523), followed by "password" (144,458), and "123456789" (94,214).

The data for the top 49 passwords is below. Now hurry up and change yours.

RankPasswordFrequency
1123456753,305
2linkedin172,523
3password144,458
412345678994,314
51234567863,769
611111157,210
7123456749,652
8sunshine39,118
9qwerty37,538
1065432133,854
1100000032,490
12password130,981
13abc12330,398
14charlie28,049
15linked25,334
16maggie23,892
17michael23,075
1866666622,888
19princess22,122
2012312321,826
21iloveyou20,251
22123456789019,575
23Linkedin119,441
24daniel19,184
25bailey18,805
26welcome18,504
27buster18,395
28Passw0rd18,208
29baseball17,858
30shadow17,781
3112121217,134
32hannah17,040
33monkey16,958
34thomas16,789
35summer16,652
36george16,620
37harley16,275
3822222216,165
39jessica16,088
40GINGER16,040
41michelle16,024
42abcdef15,938
43sophie15,884
44jordan15,839
45freedom15,793
4655555515,664
47tigger15,658
48joshua15,628
49pepper15,610

NOW WATCH: This smart earpiece translates languages as they are spoken