In conjunction with World Password Day on Thursday (5 May), a VPN service company, ExpressVPN shared an infographic that showed the most common passwords used in various countries and cultures.
According to ExpressVPN, this is part of their effort to increase public awareness about the importance of privacy and cybersecurity.
With this, they reminded everyone that “common passwords are bad passwords”.
For example, “123456” is one of the most-used password in most places around the world.
However, ExpressVPN took it a step further by sorting the frequently used passwords by country or language, and they stumble across a very different result. “It becomes more interesting when cultural differences influence the use of bad passwords.” they said.
As for Malaysia and Indonesia, it turns out that “sayang” is a common password, which is similar to the most common passowrds in the United States — “iloveyou”.
“Sayang is a term used to express affection (such as love, sweetheart), or a missed opportunity,” they explained on Facebook.
Meanwhile, the study also found that the most common passwords in Italy is “juventus”, a popular Italian football team, and in France, “azerty” is common due to how French keyboards are arranged (as opposed to “qwerty”).
Unfortunately, ExpressVPN said people are generally not good at selecting passwords.
In an online survey, they found that the average adult in US uses the same password across six different websites or platforms, and some even opts to use their own first or last name in the passwords they create.
It added that despite these poor cybersecurity practices, 81% of the respondents said they are confident in the security and privacy of their current online passwords.
The company then advised users to use password managers and to create passwords that are long, random and unique for each and every account they may have.
, a VPN service company, ExpressVPN shared an infographic that showed the most common passwords used in various countries and cultures.){kind=link}