Proprietary password manager service NordPass revealed in its 2023 study for the most commonly used passwords among 35 countries around the world that “admin” was the most common password in the Philippines, requiring under a second to crack and bypass.

NordPass, in its methodology, noted the passwords they listed and compiled were done so by partnering with independent researchers specializing in cybersecurity incident research. The researchers evaluated a 4.3 terabyte database extracted from various publicly available sources, including dark web sources.

No personal data was acquired or purchased to conduct this study, the company added.

The 20 most commonly used passwords in the Philippines are as follows. Note that some of these commonly used passwords differ slightly in usage of lowercase and uppercase letters.

• admin
• 123456
• 12345678
• 123456789
• password
• 12345
• Password
• 1234567890
• 12345678910
• user
• smartbro
• learning
• admin123
• P@ssw0rd
• greatnews
• qwerty123
• iloveyou
• coffee1234
• wisdom
• 1234567

According to NordPass, most of these passwords take under a second to crack, with “learning” taking at most 3 hours to crack and bypass.

This is dependent on a hacker knowing the ins and outs of password cracking, but generative AI may speed this up for brute-force attacks.

In an April 18 article by cybersecurity firm Hive Systems, they pointed out ChatGPT could brute-force passwords and turn an hour-long exercise into a much shorter endeavor for hackers.

To make brute-force processes take much longer to crack your password, Hive Systems showcased a matrix with the approximate times it would take to crack a unique password given certain sets of parameters.

For instance, unique passwords at least 14 characters long and containing mix of numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and symbols could take as long as 3,000 years to crack using current ChatGPT hardware. A longer and more complex password string can potentially take up to 79 billion years to crack, at least using current generative AI tech.

To keep all your unique passwords safe for your many accounts, we also advise storing them safely using password management software that can’t be accessed online. – Rappler.com