No truly "uncrackable" password exists as technology improves, but you can create extremely strong ones using long, random passphrases (multiple random words) or complex mixes of characters, often generated by password managers, making them practically impossible to crack within a human lifetime. The key is length, randomness, and uniqueness, using a combination of upper/lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, avoiding common patterns or personal info.
There's no one password that is the “most secure”, and if there was, to write it here would make it insecure, as thousands of people would use it on their accounts. Rather, secure passwords contain a seemingly random combination of numbers, letters and symbols and include at least 16 to 20 characters.
Here's the 2023 list of the 10 weakest passwords :
The Least Common PINs
According to the same data, the least commonly used 4-digit PIN is 8068, with just 25 occurrences out of the 3.4 million passwords examined — a minuscule 0.000744% frequency . The 10 least popular 4-digit PINs found in the study's dataset, starting with the least common, are: 8068. 8093.
8675309 is a famously common 7-digit password due to the popular 1980s song "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone, making it highly guessable and a security risk. It's often ranking among the most used 7-digit passwords alongside sequences like 1234567.
They also prefer numbers that are easy to type, like the figure “2580” which goes straight down the numberpad. Other predictable numbers stem from the fact that we use birthdays and birth-years so we can easily remember the PIN code.
This year's winner, 123456, has come top three times. It has only been beaten by 12345, which happened in 2019, and by the ever-popular “password”, in 2022. Here are the 200 most common passwords from 2019-2022.
Because our normal number base is 10, so that is all we need. These symbols, known as “Arabic numerals” were adopted from India and the Middle East to replace the Roman numeral system, IVXLCDM, which was non-positional, lacked zero, and had only 7 numeral symbols borrowed from the alphabet.
It's just 1234 in reverse. Some people have tried to be clever; they've mixed things up by choosing 1342. 2580 might seem like a strange one to be in the top 40…
Many of the stolen passwords were embarrassingly simple. Variations of “password123,” “123456,” and “linkedin” (creative, right?) were found everywhere. This breach wasn't just an inconvenience—it was a gateway for hackers to access other accounts, since many users reused the same password across multiple platforms.
A Password is a word, phrase, or string of characters intended to differentiate an authorized user or process, for the purpose of permitting access (such as via logging in) from an unauthorized user. Defined another way, a password is used to prove one's identity, or authorize access to a resource.
Three random words generate a password that is not only long enough to thwart brute force attacks but also complex enough to resist common guessing techniques.
The hardest passwords to crack, for a given length and character set, are random character strings; if long enough they resist brute force attacks (because there are many characters) and guessing attacks (due to high entropy). However, such passwords are typically the hardest to remember.
The passphrase, on the other hand, is involved in deriving the cryptographic keys of the wallet. It is at the same depth as the recovery sentence (24 words). In other words, if you set up a passphrase on your wallet, the 24-word sentence alone will no longer be enough to recover your bitcoins.
None of the words jillion, zillion, squillion, gazillion, kazillion, bajillion, or bazillion (or Brazilian) are real numbers.
The word "one" comes from Old English "an", rooted in Germanic "ainaz", meaning "unique" or "single," essentially naming the concept of a single, whole item before it's part of a plural; the symbol "1" likely evolved from a simple vertical line representing a single stroke or angle, with the word matching the singular count it represents. It's called "one" because it's the fundamental unit, symbolizing unity and existence from which other numbers are built, a concept deeply ingrained in language and early mathematics.
Simple passwords, such as 12345, or common identifying information, like birthdays and pet names, are not safe for protecting important accounts holding personal information. Using an easy-to-guess password is like locking the door but leaving the key in the lock.
Below are the Top 10 Most Hacked Passwords in the U.S. for 2024:
Human brains were responsible for choosing passwords like "123456", "password," and "qwerty." But there is no way that 91,103 people independently chose to secure their accounts with "18atcskd2w." Instead, what I believe happened is that these accounts were created by bots, perhaps with the intention of posting spam ...
Make your master password long and complex—don't use “qwerty”. Password managers with browser extensions can help deter phishing. Your password manager will object to entering a password into the wrong website, no matter how convincing it looks.
Once again, “password,” “123456” and “12345678” were the top three most common passwords. But there were some interesting new additions to the list. “Jesus” and “Welcome” were new. So were “ninja,” “mustang” and, intriguingly, “password1.”
During one study she conducted, Cranor actually asked participants who chose the primate to explain why they picked it. "Basically people said they like monkeys, monkeys are cute," says Cranor. "Some people said they had a pet named monkey, they had a friend whose nickname was monkey, it was all very positive."