Why your password is nowhere near as safe as you think

Earlier this year we learned that the most commonly-used passwords are '123456', 'password', and the ever-imaginative 'qwerty'.

A new analysis of 10million passwords confirms this, but also reveals that what we might consider randomly-created passwords are a lot more common - and easier to hack - than we would think.

The 30th most common password in the dataset was 'qaz2wsx', a so-called keyboard pattern or walk that can be guessed by hackers in seconds.

That last keyboard walk by the way? It's a smartphone exclusive:

Numbers added to passwords - as 420,000 or 8.4 per cent of the passwords had - also does little in terms of security, as one-fifth of people who did so just chose the numeral 1.

WP Engine, the internet company that carried out the analysis, notes:

We are, for the most part, predictably unimaginative when it comes to choosing passwords, despite a decade of warnings from password strength checkers during sign-ups. We love shortcuts, and so do password crackers.

Our apparent lack of imagination will seemingly spell the end of the password itself, with Apple moving towards thumbprint technology on its iPhones, Yahoo! setting up a single-use password via users' mobile phones, and Microsoft letting users access Windows 10 with either their face or fingerprints.

Source: [WP Engine]5

More: [The 25 most popular passwords of 2014]6