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The 25 worst passwords of 2013

Internet security firm SplashData has released its list of the worst passwords of 2013. King of terrible passwords, "password", has finally been unseated from its throne.

Michelle Starr Science editor
Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming about bats.
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Michelle Starr
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Internet security firm SplashData has released its list of the worst passwords of 2013. King of terrible passwords, "password", has finally been unseated from its throne.

(Credit: Warded lock image by Thegreenj, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Le roi est mort, vive le roi! The world's most popular terrible password — "password" — has been deposed for the first time. The magic combination that booted it from its throne? "123456", naturally.

This makes rather a lot of sense, actually. SplashData compiles its top 25 from lists of stolen passwords posted online, and this year, Adobe's massive security breach, as well as information gleaned from SpiderLabs, had already revealed the sequence of numbers as top of the pops.

That Adobe hack is probably the reason passwords like "adobe123" and "photoshop" made the cut this year. Also new is a greater proliferation of numerical strings.

  1. 123456

  2. password

  3. 12345678

  4. qwerty

  5. abc123

  6. 123456789

  7. 111111

  8. 1234567

  9. iloveyou

  10. adobe123

  11. 123123

  12. admin

  13. 1234567890

  14. letmein

  15. photoshop

  16. 1234

  17. monkey

  18. shadow

  19. sunshine

  20. 12345

  21. password1

  22. princess

  23. azerty

  24. trustno1

  25. 000000

For junk accounts that don't contain any personal info, you might not care too much, but it really is better to take all available steps to keep your data as safe as possible. This is best done by creating a different password for every account — we have some tips on creating secure, memorable passwords here, and some tools for generating random passwords here.

If you think you'll run into some problems remembering all your passwords, you can grab a password vault, such as LastPass, KeePass and 1Password that act as a sort of master key, keeping your various passwords safe while you only have to remember one.