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What were the worst passwords of 2023?

Answer: You can probably guess.

Cogin screen
Shutterstock/Kaspri
If it took you less than a second to guess “123456,” congratulations, you’re as fast as a computer at cracking the most common password of 2023. Equal points if you also guessed “password,” which was No. 2 in the U.S. and just as easy to crack.

NordPass has crunched the numbers across 35 countries to reveal the most common (and worst) passwords of the last year, and the top 10 should honestly surprise absolutely no one. In third and fourth place were “12345678” and “123456789,” because of course just adding the next number in the sequence is something no one would predict. Or you could really mix it up and take out some numbers to get the top fifth and sixth passwords: “1234” and “12345,” respectively.

The remaining top 10 are all of the same variety and took less than one second to crack. Then there is an outlier at No. 11, “UNKNOWN,” which took 17 minutes to crack. That’s impressive considering the rest of the top 20 were easily cracked in 11 seconds or less. If any of your passwords look like anything on this list, this is your wake-up call.