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The report states that it takes around 14 hours to hack a password across 25 European countries on average, but some regions are more at risk than others. This includes Russia, where it takes an average of 8.96 seconds to crack, Latvia at 17.48 seconds, Spain at 26.52 seconds, and Switzerland at 36.26 seconds. To put this into perspective, the most used password, “123456,” has been used as a password over 129,000 times in Switzerland alone. To get the results, Custard used the top thirty most used passwords in each country from Nord Pass’ research (opens in new tab) in 2021, and measured the time it would take to crack each password using an automated brute force password checker (opens in new tab). Many of the passwords used in these countries such as “123456,” “qwerty” and “password” take as little as 0.2 seconds for hackers to swiftly gain access. The report also shows that other countries such as Greece, Germany, Denmark and Hungary are known to use these common passwords as well. In fact, 84% of the 25 European countries analysed had “123456” as the most commonly used password. However, there are other credentials that leave a user’s account compromised, too. This includes “iloveyou,” which has been used over four million times, along with “1q2w3e4r” at over three million, “dragon” at over two million, “pokemon” at 980,000, and “liverpool” at 930,000. All of these take under one second to break, even if others are slight variations from common passwords. As previously reported, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) revealed the top 20 most commonly hacked password categories that everyone should avoid. Many of these includes names for people and pets, food and animals, with many not having numbers or symbols. It’s a good idea to update your password with a random yet memorable assortment of letters, numbers and symbols, as it doesn’t take much for a hacker to bypass simple passwords. Password managers are a great way to keep your credentials in order. They store all your unique passwords in a secure digital vault that can only be accessed by you, and they can generate strong, random passwords.
