It wouldn’t take a genius to crack any of the 25 most common passwords of 2016

If you have one of these, you should probably change it. Like, immediately.

Hacking might seem like an extremely sophisticated pursuit to the average man or woman on the street, but judging by the most common passwords used on the Internet last year, it might be a lot more straightforward than one would think. Password management and digital vault software company Keeper Security conducted a study of Internet passwords used in 2016, analysing over 10 million passwords that became public through data breaches that happened last year. And, as you’ll see in the list at the bottom of the page, those guilty of the data breaches didn’t exactly have to work that hard to breach the data in question. The most popular password, by a long way, was the classic ‘123456,’ with the study finding that it was used in over 17% of cases examined as part of the study. Five of the remaining passwords used in the top ten were various number sequences beginning with 123, while it’s no surprise to see old favourites ‘password’ and ‘qwerty’ in the top ten. If you’re wondering why seemingly complicated passwords such as ‘18atcskd2w’ and ‘3rjs1la7qe’ are making the list, meanwhile, security expert Graham Cluley told Keeper Security that it is because bots use these codes over and over when they set up dummy accounts on public email services for spam and phishing attacks. Considering that most of the passwords on the list below can be compromised within seconds by dictionary-based cracking tools, Keeper Security advise using a variety of characters in a password, to avoid dictionary terms and to use a password manager to ensure your accounts are as safe as possible. Any of these look familiar?

The 25 most common passwords of 2016

1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. qwerty
4. 12345678
5. 111111
6. 1234567890
7. 1234567
8. password
9. 123123
10. 987654321
11. qwertyuiop
12. mynoob
13. 123321
14. 666666
15. 18atcskd2w
16. 777777
17. 1q2w3e4r
18. 654321
19. 555555
20. 3rjs1la7qe
21. google
22. 1q2w3e4r5t
23. 123qwe
24. Zxcvbnm
25. 1qtw3e

Catch up with this week's episode of Football Friday Live: