"Password" most widely used password in India, "bigbasket" fourth: Report

"Bigbasket" has been used by over 75,000 users in India as their password, and it would take about 5 minutes for hackers to crack it, a report by NordPass showed

"Password" continues to be the most widely used password in India, a new report showed. It is used by nearly 3.5 million users in the country, and it would take less than one second for hackers to hack it. It is followed by "123456", which can also be cracked within one second.

The fourth most widely used password in India is the name of a start-up, the report released by NordPass showed. "Bigbasket" has been used by over 75,000 users in India as their password. It would, however, take about 5 minutes to crack it. The third most widely used password is 12345678.

"We learned that despite growing cybersecurity awareness, old habits die hard. The research shows that people still use weak passwords to protect their accounts," the report said.

The country's 11th, 18th and 19th most popular passwords were found to be different spellings of "India". These were Indya123, India@123 and india123, which have been used 7,512, 5,321 and 5,207 times, respectively.

Four out of the top 10 passwords are numeric, three are textual, and the rest are alphanumeric.

Globally too, "password" was found to be the most widely used password. It is used by over 4.9 million users worldwide. It is followed by "123456" and "123456789".

The analysis of the trend showed a change in the use of passwords. For the last two years, "123456" was the most widely used password globally. In 2019, "12345" was the most-used password. However, this year, a textual password has topped the list.

The strong impact of culture

The report also analysed the impact of culture on the usage of particular words as passwords.

"The glitziest film industry event of the year – the Oscars ceremony – inspired many to use not-so-glitzy passwords: the password 'Oscars' was used 62,983 times," it said.

Millions of passwords were kept on the name of the movies or TV series released in 2020/21, like Batman, Encanto and Euphoria.

"'batman' was used 2,562,776 times, 'euphoria' 53,993, and 'encanto' 10,808 times," it added.

Moreover, some of the top passwords in the world were kept after the names of fashion brands, sports stars and movies.

"Tiffany", "Aldo", "Leon", "Coco", and "U2" were some of the other widely used passwords globally.