That relationship is toxic for you: Why you may need to swipe left on your favorite p@55wOrD$!

Since the start of the new year, we’ve been sifting through billions of compromised email addresses and passwords found on the Dark Web  looking for interesting trends in password behavior. Rather than just give you the top 10 passwords to avoid, we wanted to take a closer look at user behavior when creating passwords and how those behaviors lead to predictability and potential exploits.

Passwords are often deeply personal expressions of oneself with the goal of making them easier to remember. However, remembering which password is which is becoming increasingly difficult in our hyper-digital daily lives. In fact, it is estimated that average US adult has between 90 and 135  different applications that require a set of credentials (typically a username and/or email address and password combination) for access.

Would your current password make the grade? Use our Password Report Card to see how yours rank!

{{cta(‘8243a843-8c1c-4e7e-a9ba-5ca8868ca970′,’justifycenter’)}}As a result of this onslaught of apps of convenience, most people choose easy to remember, insecure passwords that can be divided into 24 Common Password Types. These types, listed below, represent the most common categories of personal facts and interests that people draw from to create their passwords based on our analysis of the billions of email address and password combinations that we’ve extracted from data breaches, password dumps, and Dark Web forums by our intelligence teams over the past 7 years.

The 24 Most Common Password Types

Using a randomized data set of more than 1 billion email address and password combinations discovered over the past 12 months, we can successfully demonstrate how  the most common password types stack up by percentage as represented on the chart below.

The most common password types by percentage (per 1000 records)

Next, we dug into perhaps the most sought after piece – the most common English language passwords used. You should pay particular attention to the password complexity and password strength of the most commonly found passwords. The results were rather bleak. The average length of the passwords sampled was 7.007 characters in length. The shortest common passwords identified were comprised of just 4 characters, while the longest of the most common passwords were 16 characters in length.

Most common passwords

– Kevin Lancaster