Here's Yet Another Reason Why You Really Should Start Using Better Passwords
An Anonymous User wrote in with a story submission; it became this story.
After analyzing 15 billion passwords, these are the most common phrases people use:
[...] the CyberNews Investigation team was interested in what kind of patterns everyday people were using in creating their own passwords. We collected data from publicly leaked data breaches, including the Breach Compilation, Collection #1-5, and other databases. We then anonymized the data and detached the passwords so that we could look at that data in isolation.
In total, we were able to analyze 15,212,645,925 passwords, of which 2,217,015,490 were unique. We discovered some interesting things about the way that people create passwords: their favorite sports teams, cities, food and even curse words. We could even deduce the probable age of the person by looking at which year they use in their password.
As the data came in various forms, we filtered the results to only include terms that we could make sense of, and from which we could gather some insights.
[...] Of course, at this point this conversation has all become moot: the best passwords are the ones that you don't need to remember at all. For this reason, we normally strongly recommend that people use password managers. These easy-to-use tools will create very complex passwords for you that you don't even have to remember.
They mostly come as browser extensions that will create or fill in your usernames and passwords for you. The only thing you need to remember is one master password to use the password managers.
Now, if you noticed that your own personal passwords have similar patterns to the ones we analyzed, and that these passwords can be considered rather simple, we recommend you visit our Data Leak Checker to see if your email address and other personal data has been exposed in a data breach.
The CyberNews Data Leak Checker currently has the largest database of known breached accounts, with more than 15 billion compromised accounts. So, chances are that if your account has been leaked, we'll probably have a record of it.
(Emphasis from original retained here.)
Another useful site for checking if an email address has been compromised is: https://haveibeenpwned.com/.
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