Millions in this digital world still use ‘123456’ as their password

When it comes to using passwords in this increasingly digital world, are people simply too lazy to use strong ones and consistently change them, or is it that generating a strong password is a very hard task?

There are about 4.4 billion internet users, and about 3.5 billion social media users with about 3.3 billion people using social media on mobile devices, according to data from wearesocial.com. Yet, of the billions of passwords floating online, the password ‘123456’ has been found 23 million times in the breaches that Troy Hunt collected. The study was done in collaboration with the UK-based National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

You might think that choosing a more complex password such as ‘oreocookie’ is better. But even that has been seen over 3,000 times, the report notes.