Telekom ranking
From “Schalke04” to “Ronaldo1”: These are the most popular but also the simplest passwords
Can you still remember your password?
© Oliver Berg / DPA
What is my password? Anyone who asks themselves this could be doing everything right – because they may change a complicated combination of characters frequently. Others have it easy for criminals.
Whether “Schalke04” or “Borussia”: Many football fans use the Deutsche Telekom passwords are far too easy. On Thursday, the Magenta Group published a list of simple codes from Telekom customers that cybercriminals had illegally seized and offered for sale in dark channels. Telekom has a special security team that keeps an eye on such dark channels and informs its customers if their passwords appear there. For example, criminals used so-called phishing emails to obtain security data from unsuspecting users.
“We see that German users continue to use what is most obvious to them as their password too often – and that is exactly what makes them vulnerable,” explained Telekom security chief Thomas Tschersich. If you try out the Bundesliga table club by club together with all the e-mails that I could easily find on the Internet, you would unfortunately generate tens of thousands of active access keys. “And that is too simple and has never been contemporary.”
Older users use names as passwords
According to Telekom’s findings, the classic “Password1” is still common among the insecure access data, followed by “Schalke04” in second place. “Borussia” follows in 8th place, “Dortmund09” in 18th place, “Football” in 20th place and “Ronaldo1” in 26th place. The course of the current Bundesliga season also has an impact on the negative password ranking: “”Bayer04Lev” is on the rise, while “FCBayern” is out of the top 40,” said a Telekom spokesman and urges more complicated and therefore more secure passwords at.
The password “1q2w3e4r”, which initially seems comparatively difficult, comes in 6th place in the ranking. However, this code is also far too simple: these eight numbers and letters are right next to each other on the keyboard. First names such as Maximilian and Heinrich are also often used as passwords, without numbers or special characters. According to Telekom, these are mostly older users who have not changed their password for a very long time.