Throughout the world but also in France, the most used password in 2023 remains the iconic “123456”, decipherable in less than a second. In the list, the ones that follow aren’t much harder to find.
It is in close collaboration with independent researchers specializing in cybersecurity and based on a gigantic database collected particularly on the dark web, that NordPass established its study of the most common passwords in France. You will see that despite the awareness and the protection tools that exist, such as password managers, overall practices are still difficult to change.
The password king is always the same, year after year
Like last year, the famous “123456” remains the most common password in France and around the world. We’ll let you see the rest of the top 20.
- 123456
- 123456789
- azerty
- admin
- 1234561
- azertyuiop
- loulou
- 000000
- doudou
- password
- marseille
- password
- 12345678
- pet
- sun
- horse
- 12345
- Password
- Good morning
- 1234567891
The famous “123456” has no competition, since it was found 86,656 times in the database studied, weighing around 5 TB. The second, “123456789” has been totalized 38,771 times. A real abyss. “Chouchou” and “loulou” are in a good place in the ranking, enough to please Alexandra Lamy and Jean Dujardin.
Note that globally, “123456” is also the number one most common password among those discovered in hacker data. It is followed by “admin” and “12345678”. Each time, it doesn’t take more than a second for a hacker to crack these passwords, with the exception of “marseille”, which can take a good day, if the process is automated.
Passwords can no longer be used as primary protection
For the 2023 edition of its study, NordPass has innovated by also presenting us with results based on the passwords most used by Internet users for different online services. We learn, for example, that the weakest passwords used by users concern their streaming accounts.
For the technical director of NordPass, Tomas Smalakys, “ this trend could be associated with the common management of shared accounts and the use of easy-to-remember passwords for reasons of practicality “. Those chosen for the financial accounts are, on the other hand, the most solid. There is a form of logic in this, especially since banking establishments, credit organizations or insurance companies impose for some a combination of numbers, special characters and letters.
Because all the good will in the world is not enough to make the password sufficiently protective, the alternative of security keys (access keys or passkeys) is emerging as a new form of authentication. The user no longer needs to create a password, and when they connect to a compatible website, their device generates a pair of keys (one public, one private), the first being saved on the device , the second stored on the website server.
If the user is identified using biometric means, then the keys are associated and identification is done in no time. This is undoubtedly where the future lies. Google and others are in any case pushing in this direction.
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