BENGALURU: It doesn’t get weaker than this.

Poor password hygiene compromises personal data privacy.

In 2023, “123456” was the most common password among Indians, showed the fifth edition of the NordPass study.In fact, almost a third (31%) of the world’s most popularpasswords consist of purely numerical sequences, such as “123456789,” “12345,” “000000,” and others.Internet users often go for country or city names and India is no exception here, with “India@123” ranked high in the country’s list.

Interestingly, “barcelona” is trending in Spain and “kalamata” in Greece.NordPass study showed that people use the weakest passwords for their streaming accounts.

According to Tomas Smalakys, CTO at NordPass, this could be associated with people managing shared accounts and using easy-to-remember passwords for convenience.

In contrast, the strongest passwords are used for financial accounts.Instead of improving password creation habits, internet users have gone in another direction by sticking to already pre-configured passwords.

The word “admin”, which, most likely, is one of the passwords that people do not bother changing, made it among this year’s most common passwords in India and many other countries.Last year’s global winner “password” is not leaving internet users’ passwords.

In India, “password”, “Pass@123”, and similar variations appeared among the most common passwords this year, the study showed.

As many as 70% of the passwords in this year’s global list can be cracked in less than a second.

The study also revealed what kind of passwords people use for different platforms and whether they vary in strength.To find out about passwords users employ for different platforms, NordPass researchers analysed a 6.6 TB database of passwords.