Ashley Madison Users Made Terrible Password Choices

It's no secret that many (most?) people choose their passwords without much thought — things like kids or pets names, their birthday, even the word "password". All are commonly seen and used as examples of what not to make your password, but many Internet users don't listen, and unless they're forced to use a secure password, they'll select the path of least resistance. The users of Ashley Madison were, largely, no exception.

Ashley Madison's data was stolen recently, as you're likely aware of, and among the nabbed data were encrypted user passwords. Due to a programming error, millions of those passwords have been decrypted...and a lot of them are pretty bad. Tip #1: never make your password "123456". Or "12345". Etcetera.

The top 100 worst passwords among the decrypted Ashley Madison have been revealed, and they include the aforementioned number string — as well as the word "DEFAULT", "qwerty", "password", "12345678", and "abc123".

To put in perspective how poor these choices were, of the currently decrypted passwords, 120,511 of them has "123456" as their password. The second most common password was "12345". Seeing the pattern? Slot number three is for the password "password", which was used by 39,448 users. Not familiar with the Ashley Madison hack? Check out the timeline below for all the details!

VIA: Ars Technica