The most common
password used in India is ‘password’ and not ‘123456’ as has been widely speculated,
according to the study carried out by NordPass on Thursday.

Interestingly,
Japan is the only other country that had the same top password as India. This is despite repeated warnings from the police  and civil society
organizations about choosing strong passwords that cannot be easily broken.

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According to 7
News, global password manager NordPass conducted research on passwords in 50
countries and the amount of time it takes to crack each one.

Apart
from ‘password’, some other commonly used passwords in India are 12345, 123456,
123456789, India123, 1234567890, 123456. Qwerty and abc123.

NordPass said all
these passwords, with the exception of ‘india123’ can be cracked in less than 1
second. And, india123 is a password that would take 17 minutes to crack. While
these time frames are only indicative, they still provide an idea of how secure
a password is.

NordPass CEO Jonas
Karklys said in a statement, “It’s important to understand that passwords
are the gateway to our digital lives, and with us spending more time online,
it’s becoming enormously important to take better care of our cybersecurity,”

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“Unfortunately,
passwords keep getting weaker, and people still don’t maintain proper password
hygiene,” he said.

“Passwords
such as 12345 and variations of qwerty were ranked high in the lists.
Worldwide, these combinations are also quite popular, as well as localised
versions of qwerty (for example, aazerty’ in French speaking countries),”
the research showed.

Password
strength is a measure of password performance against fraud and guessing.
Mumbai police are one of the many police departments that have repeatedly
warned about weak online security passwords.

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The
list of NordPass passwords was compiled in collaboration with independent
researchers working specifically on cybersecurity incidents. They evaluated a
4TB database for analysis.

This research also
illustrated how weak the top passwords are, indicating the time it would take a
hacker to crack a password.