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It is becoming increasingly difficult for teams to breach Liverpool's defence in the Premier League but not so in the cyber world.
As it turns out, 'Liverpool' is most commonly used password of a Premier League club that was accurately predicted by hackers as part of a survey by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of the Department for Digital, Media and Sport (DCMS) of the British Government.
The NCSC analysed global breaches that were already in the public domain and found out that about 280,723 users had 'liverpool' as the password to protect their sensitive data.
'123456' is still the most widely used password with about 23.2 million accounts trusting that string or series of numbers to protect their data.
Among Premier League clubs, 'chelsea' was the second widely used password, occuring about 216,677 times, followed by 'arsenal' (179,095 times).
Brighton more widely used than Manchester City
Manchester United may be struggling to claim their top four status but at least on this list, they finished fourth with 'man utd' returning as the password 59,440 times.
Their noisy neighbours Manchester City, however, were 11th on the list with people using 'everton', 'wolves' and even 'brighton' as passwords more than 'mancity'.
Passwords bearing Premier League team names successfully breached:
1. liverpool 280,723 times
2. chelsea 216,677
3. arsenal 179,095
4. man utd 59,440
5. everton 46,619
6. wolves 35,256
7. newcastle 32,143
8. tottenham 19,596
9. westham 18,801
10. brighton 15,523
11. mancity 13,796
..
18. burnley 3,494
A password is said to be reused when a hacker has breached a user's account and used that password in other platforms to carry out cyber attacks.
The analysis also threw up interesting results in the music field as 'blink182' seems to be more widely used than any other artist as a password. In the list of passwords featuring a musician or an artist, blink182 tops with 285,706 mentions (more than that of Liverpool). The others in the top 5 include 50cent (191,153), eminem (167,983), metallica (140,841) and slipknot (140,833). About 3.6 million accounts used 'password' as that protective string.
The survey urged people to protect their information in a better way by using stronger strings as passwords.
Speaking to the NCSC website, the unit's technical director Dr Ian Levy said:
“Password re-use is a major risk that can be avoided - nobody should protect sensitive data with somethisng that can be guessed, like their first name, local football team or favourite band.
“Using hard-to-guess passwords is a strong first step and we recommend combining three random but memorable words. Be creative and use words memorable to you, so people can’t guess your password.”
