Easily cracked: Australia's most popular and weakest passwords

'Banned', '123456' and 'admin' have topped the list in 2023, according to a NordPass analysis of passwords leaked on the dark web and other publicly available sources.

Hackers would be able to break into an account with the password 'banned' within two minutes, NordPass said.

The majority of passwords in Australia's top 20 most commonly used list could be cracked by a hacker in less than one second, NordPass said.

'Deadman01', the 16^th most popular Australian password, was slightly more secure with a hacking time of one minute.

The research found that Australians use their weakest passwords when securing their streaming service account and their strongest for financial accounts.

"This could be associated with people jointly managing shared accounts and using easy-to-remember passwords for convenience," chief technology officer at NordPass Tomas Smalakys said.

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NordPass said a consistent and ill-advised trend was using simple dictionary words to secure online accounts such as 'banned', 'welcome11' and 'Deadman01'.

A list of numbers in consecutive order was also a common, and easily hacked, password.

"123456 just doesn't cut it anymore," Mr Smalakys said.

A 20 character-long random passwords containing uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers provided the most security, he said.

Passwords associated with online games, movies and fiction were popular around the world.

In Australia 'Starwars29' ranked as the 13^th most popular password while 'Aladdin66' was popular in Taiwan, 'Supermario12' in Austria and 'gtasanadreas123' in Mexico.

'Admin', ranked third in Australia, was one of the most popular passwords around the world this year.

Avoid these trends and stay vigilant to malware and phishing emails, NordPass said.

Third-party password management software or passkeys were more secure options for logging in to online accounts, NordPass said.