after serial hacks, France has still not learned its lesson

Did you know? It takes less than a second for a well-designed computer program to break into an account with the password “123456”. And despite the fact that year after year, cybersecurity experts sound the alarm about the general weakness of our passwords, these 6 small numbers remain, even in 2024, the most used password in France.

NordPass, a well-known password manager and subsidiary of NordVPN, has just published the ranking of the worst passwords used in France in 2024. To establish this ranking of shame, specialists combed through 2.5 TB of data from different leaks to identify the most recurring character sequences.

123456 still No. 1

As shown in the table below, the famous “123456” has been spotted more than 68,000 times while its variant “123456789” has appeared 35,000 thousand times. “Azerty” and “Azertyuiop” also remain shockingly high in the rankings with 29,248 and 13,797 occurrences respectively. Suffice to say that, for originality (and safety), we will come back.

Special mention all the same to “Camille” and “Marseille” which, although not very original passwords, are still a little harder to guess than the rest of the entries in the ranking.

Small subtlety this year all the same, NordPass also analyzed the worst passwords used in the professional context. And to protect sensitive corporate data, the French… are not more careful, since the classification is almost the same with 2-3 exceptions. An observation that is both terrifying and reassuring.

You have to kill the password

This ranking comes at a pivotal moment in terms of cybersecurity awareness. Indeed, France has just experienced a deadly year to say the least in terms of data leaks. 2024 started off with a bang with huge leaks from a bunch of complementary health insurance and mutual insurance companies and was then punctuated by alerts every month, if not every week. Whether on the side of LDLC, Boulanger, Free, SFR or, more recently, Picard, no one has been spared.

If the strength of passwords was not always in question, it is clear that many Internet users nevertheless continue to use identifiers that are too easily guessable, making them even more vulnerable. But after years of regretting these bad practices without it changing much, it is clear that we must now look for different technical solutions.

To go further
What are the best free and paid password managers?

The burden of having to create passwords all the time for all our digital activities will, it seems, always create weak links. Perhaps it is time to reinvent our approach to online identification, whether through passports which are slowly starting to arrive or via security tokens or secret links.

One thing is for sure, the password and the bad habits that accompany it must die.