The Worst Passwords from 2013

Stories like the recent Target credit card breach serve as strong reminders of how easy it can be for our personal, business or financial information to be hacked. For physicians, a security breach can be an even larger issue because of patient data.

And, yet, we never learn when it comes to creating passwords.

“Seeing passwords like ‘adobe123’ and ‘photoshop’ on this list offers a good reminder not to base your password on the name of the website or application you are accessing,” Morgan Slain, chief executive officer of SplashData, said in a statement.

SplashData released its list of the most common passwords (and therefore easily guessed by hackers) for 2013 and a lot of the top 10 looks awfully familiar. People using these passwords continue to put themselves at risk — something physicians might not be able to afford if there’s a data breach.

Slain pointed out that despite the fact that websites are enforcing stronger password policies, more short numerical passwords showed up, like “1234” at number 16 and “000000” at number 25.

"As always, we hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites."

Secure passwords often use a mix of characters, but substituting a number for a letter sometimes isn’t enough because of today’s technology, according to SplashData. So “dr4mat1c” might be just as easy to figure out as “dramatic.” The company recommends using short words separated by symbols (i.e. “smiles_light_skip?”). In particular, SplashData warns against using the same password for entertainment sites as email or financial service sites.

Overall, there were two new entries to the top 10 and 10 new passwords in the top 25. See the full list on the next page.

Worst passwords

1. 123456 — up one spot from 2012

2. password — down one spot

3. 12345678 — unchanged

4. qwerty — up one spot

5. abc123 — down one spot

6. 123456789 — new entry

7. 111111 — up two spots

8. 1234567 — up five spots

9. iloveyou — up two spots

10. adobe123 — new entry