A recent study conducted by password management solution company Nordpass has determined that Samsung, or rather “samsung” with a lowercase S, counts among one of the most commonly used passwords in at least in 30 countries. This puts at risk the security of millions of users worldwide.
Using the name of your favorite smartphone/TV/home appliance brand, i.e., Samsung, as a password is not the worst offender, but this trend has increased in popularity over the past few years. While the “samsung” password ranked 198th in popularity in 2019, it also kept gaining ranks to 189th in 2020 and 78th place in 2021, breaking the top-100 mark last year.
The most used password is “password,” which was reportedly picked by nearly 5 million users. Other frequently-used passwords are “123456,” “123456789,” and “guest.” As for “samsung,” it turns out that it is not the only brand-based password adopted by countless users online. Other brands, such as Tiffany, Nike, and Adidas, are also popular. Some car enthusiasts have been found to use passwords like “kia” and “mini.” (via Naver)
7-digit passwords like “samsung” can be decrypted in 7 seconds
Whether people use “Samsung” with an uppercase or a lowercase “S” as a password doesn't seem to make that big of a change for security. According to the recent report, a simple and predictable password can be decrypted in less than 1 second. Whereas combining lowercase and uppercase letters with numbers can also have varying results. A 7-digit password that combines all those elements can take around 7 seconds to decrypt, while an 8-digit password takes around 7 minutes.
The research firm found that because they're short and consist only of numbers or letters without any uppercase characters, the majority of commonly-used passwords can be decrypted in less than one second.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn't use “Samsung” or “samsung” as your password when creating a new account, whether it's a Members account or otherwise. Countless other users thought this would be a wise idea, and their passwords turned out to be some of the easiest to predict and crack.
