Worst passwords of 2020 revealed — are you vulnerable?

The list of the most common passwords of 2020 is out. And it looks like a lot of folks — and their companies — are vulnerable.

NordPass just released its list of the Top 200 passwords of the year for 2020. Check out what made it to the top of the list:

1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. picture1
4. password
5. 12345678
6. 111111
7. 123123
8. 12345
9. 1234567890
10. senha

The majority of them are the usual suspects and take less than a second to crack!

However two new entries made the top 10 that you’ll want to urge your staffers not to use:

• No. 3: picture1, which gets cracked in three hours, and
• No. 10: senha, the Spanish word for password, which takes only slightly longer than its English counterpart to crack at 10 seconds.

The full list also has some frequently tapped categories, from sports to food to curse words.

Best password practices

The last thing you want is one of your own employees relying on these all-too-easy-to-crack codes.

The new year provides a good opportunity for yet another reminder of what makes a strong password in NordPass’s eyes. It:

• has a minimum of 12 characters
• contains a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols
• gets changed at least every 90 days, and
• hasn’t been used before.

Even IRS has weighed in on what makes for a secure password. Worth checking out.

Jennifer Azara

Jennifer has covered business and finance for more than 24 years. She has written for CFOs, credit and collections professionals and accounts payable practitioners and has spoken at industry conferences on sales and use tax compliance.