Millions of Stolen Last.fm Passwords Have Been Decrypted. These Are the Top 50

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Remembering a strong password is difficult

Remembering a strong password is difficult. That’s why people keep using passwords like “123456,” “password,” and more puzzlingly, “monkey.”

Those are some of the most popular passwords from a stash of data stolen from the music-streaming platform Last.fm in 2012. Hundreds of thousands of people used those three passwords to log in to their Last.fm accounts. The passwords were decrypted by LeakedSource, which maintains a collection of publicly available hacked data.

These are the 50 most frequently used passwords from the hacked stash of 43.6 million, according to LeakedSource:

Rank Password Frequency
1 123456 255,319
2 password 92,652
3 lastfm 66,857
4 123456789 63,984
5 qwerty 46,201
6 abc123 36,367
7 abcdefg 34,050
8 12345 33,785
9 1234 30,938
10 music 27,975
11 12345678 25,876
12 111111 25,313
13 abcdefg123 21,555
14 aaaaaa 19,098
15 123123 18,147
16 123 17,225
17 liverpool 17,191
18 1234567 17,168
19 0 16,941
20 monkey 16,787
21 football 16,177
22 1234567890 14,972
23 666666 14,164
24 password1 14,016
25 last.fm 13,741
26 xbox360 13,467
27 baseball 12,645
28 iloveyou 12,160
29 dragon 12,134
30 shadow 11,893
31 123321 11,281
32 abcd 11,141
33 foxpass 10,719
34 fuckyou 10,685
35 cheese 10,669
36 musica 10,651
37 soccer 10,288
38 654321 9,969
39 sunshine 9,925
40 arsenal 9,894
41 metallica 9,891
42 superman 9,842
43 charlie 9,839
44 daniel 9,775
45 abcdef 9,376
46 letmein 9,306
47 killer 9,174
48 abcde 9,124
49 blink182 9,099
50 michael 8,997

LeakedSource says the hack took place March 22, 2012, and includes information like each account’s username, email address, join date and other data. It verified the data were authentic by checking with a known user whose credentials were in the stash.

Even if many some of those users are no longer active on last.fm, the common (and bad) habit of reusing passwords means hackers might use the leaked data to break into people’s accounts on other services.

Last.fm had 49 million registered users at the time of the hack, according to one estimate. The company reported 55 million registered users in 2014, although only a fraction of those are likely to be active users.

Last.fm was a pioneer of music streaming, and CBS acquired it for $280 million in 2007. Its parent failed to capitalize on its head start, however, and its user growth has stagnated over the years, even as losses have mounted and staff have dwindled. Spotify was launched the October after the acquisition.