A study by NordPass has revealed the most common passwords in the Netherlands and most of them can be cracked in less than a second. Furthermore, according to the password manager, people have not improved their password habits much in the past few years.
More and more admin tasks are being done digitally and on the internet, and with this you would expect that people take the precautions to protect their many online accounts. However, NordPass shows that many people in the Netherlands are still using passwords that can easily be solved.
The password that was used the most in the Netherlands was qwerty123, which can be cracked in under one second. This easy-to-guess password was used a staggering 5.486 times.
"The list of the most popular passwords shows once again that users' password habits still leave a lot to be desired," NordPass wrote, adding that more than half of passwords analysed were simple combinations of numbers and letters. Globally, the top passwords were 123456, 123456789 and 12345678.
The phenomenon also appears to be getting worse: according to NordPass, as of 2024 78 percent of the world’s top passwords can be cracked in less than a second, an 8 percentage point increase compared to 2023. They blamed this rise on the fact that people have too many passwords to remember, estimating that on average a single person has 168 personal logins and 87 logins for work.
According to NordPass, a strong password would ideally be 20 characters long and include a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special symbols. The organisation also suggests that people refrain from using common words or information that can easily be guessed such as names or birthdays. For extra protection, you should regularly review your passwords and should not use the same password over multiple websites.
The passwords that are used the most frequently in the Netherlands are the following (and if yours is among them, it would be best to change it as soon as possible):
For more information, and to see which other passwords made the top in each country, check out the NordPass website.