Is your password still 123456? If so, you’ve got a large amount of company, sharing the slot for the most common password which remains unchanged from last year, according to a recently released summary from SplashID. The long-term favourite password remains at number two and the imaginative 12345678 leaps from #4 to #3. The good news is that the proportion of people using these passwords seems to have gone down (just like a top forty song today will have probably sold a lot less than the equivalent release thirty years ago) but that doesn’t make them safe.

If any of those – or the other 22 passwords on the list – are yours, then change them immediately. Yes, that includes if you are using starwars, a new entry at #25. With some things there is security in numbers but not in having a weak and widely used password. If you have something so common, you are at risk of people guessing your password without even having to steal a collection of user credentials in the first place and you will be on the list of accounts that cracked before a data thief even begins to warm up if (or probably just when) your account is a line in someone else’s data breach.

Ideally, such short, common passwords wouldn’t even be allowed but, given that a lot of systems don’t put such an obvious safety barrier in place, take the time to do it manually. A lot of the security of your information is outside your control but setting a good password is one of the things you can do to make your data safer.