ENLARGE It's official: football is more popular than baseball. Even when it comes to accessing computers and private information.
In a list of the top 25 sports-related passwords, "football" surpassed "baseball" for No. 1 on the list, according to SplashData, which compiled more than 2 million leaked passwords during 2015, mostly from users in North America and Western Europe. That "football" ranks highest among sports passwords and seventh among all passwords could also be a reference to soccer, referred to as football in other parts of the world.
The next most popular sports passwords were "hockey," "soccer" and "golfer," while "yankees" was the highest ranked individual team on the list. The other most popular teams included "chelsea" (eighth) and "rangers" (ninth), though "rangers" benefits from its usage in multiple sports: hockey, baseball and soccer.
ENLARGE Among all passwords, "123456" and "password"[2] remained the most common.
"Jordan" ranked seventh and is the highest athlete's name on the sports list, a likely nod to Michael Jordan considering "jordan23" made the top 10[3] of SplashData's 2014 data. "Ronaldo," 18th, wa s the only other name to crack the sports top 25, even though Cristiano Ronaldo[4]'s streak of back-to-back FIFA Ballon d'Or awards in 2013 and 2014 was ended by Lionel Messi[5] in 2015.
It's clear, though, that soccer-player passwords are on the rise: "gareth" and "neymar" also made it into the top 50. Real Madrid's Gareth Bale was the most expensive signing in soccer history, while Neymar is a Brazilian superstar and Messi's Barcelona teammate.
As for Messi, he may be the greatest soccer player on the planet, but with a surname that is only five characters long, that's too short for a password in most places.
ENLARGE References
- ^ 0 COMMENTS (www.wsj.com)
- ^ "123456" and "password" (blogs.wsj.com)
- ^ made the top 10 (online.wsj.com)
- ^ Cristiano Ronaldo (topics.wsj.com)
- ^ Lionel Messi (topics.wsj.com)
