The award for the most common password of 2025 wasn’t anything complex. In fact, anyone could guess it. 

Give up? 

123456. 

That’s it. No special characters. No uppercase letters. No unique combinations. 

Just six sequential digits that stand between attackers and your sensitive data. A basic phishing kit, credential stuffing bot, or low-effort brute force attack could crack that weak combination in seconds with minimal effort. Research showed that password cracking succeeded in 46% of environments in 2025.

Not exactly reassuring news for MSPs, who are tasked with securing user accounts and reducing risk for clients. 

We’ve compiled a list of the most common passwords in 2026, including best practices on how to secure your organization from external attacks. 

Most Common Passwords in 2026 

Enforcing password hygiene and policies is a foundational step in reducing the overall attack surface, yet it remains the control most organizations ignore until a compromised account turns into a full-scale data breach. 

A recent study of over 19 billion newly exposed passwords found that 94% of passwords are reused or duplicated. It takes a single employee or remote third-party contractor to reuse a weak, predictable, or previously breached credential for attackers to escalate the compromise long before anyone notices. 

MSPs must continually reset passwords, enforce rotation policies, and monitor for credential exposure. Even in 2026, weak passwords remain a top threat for MSPs and IT teams. 

These were the 10 most popular passwords that topped the list in 2025. 

123456
123456789
1234567890
12345678
password
qwerty
qwerty123
111111
000000
iloveyou

5 Cyber Attacks That Exploit Weak Passwords 

Weak passwords are exactly what threat actors look for when scanning for easy entry points into your critical infrastructure. These are 5 of the most common attack methods attackers use to exploit them:

1. Brute Force Attack

Brute force attacks involve a trial-and-error process where attackers systematically attempt every possible combination of characters to guess a user’s password. Threat actors typically leverage password‑cracking tools, such as Mimikatz, John the Ripper, Hashcat, and Hydra, combined with distributed cracking clusters to shorten the time required to break weak credentials. 

Key findings from Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigation Report saw a 37% increase in brute force attacks against web applications. Verizon’s Analysis of SSO provider logs revealed that credential stuffing attempts comprised a median of 19% of all daily authentication events. 

Given the simplicity of the most common passwords, attackers can leverage basic automated scripts to compromise accounts in seconds.

2. Dictionary Attack

A dictionary attack is a type of brute‑force technique in which attackers use precompiled lists of common words, phrases, and password patterns, often sourced from previous breach leaks, to rapidly guess a user’s password in a “dictionary‑style” sequence. Malicious AI scripts now automate this process further by generating context‑aware password variants, predicting likely password structures based on user behavior. 

3. Rainbow Table Attack

A rainbow table attack is a cryptographic cracking technique in which attackers use precomputed tables of hash values and their corresponding plaintext passwords to quickly reverse hashed credentials. 

Instead of using brute force techniques in every possible combination, threat actors leverage massive, optimized lookup tables to match a stolen hash against known values in seconds

A good example of a rainbow table attack is when a threat actor extracts NTLM hashes from an Active Directory database without proper salting or protections, then uses a precomputed rainbow table to instantly recover user passwords to gain domain-level access.

Salting your password, or adding a unique random value to each password before hashing, is a highly recommended best practice to prevent rainbow table attacks. Without proper salting, even complex passwords can be cracked almost instantly, leaving authentication pipelines vulnerable to large‑scale credential compromise.

4. Password Spraying

Password spraying is another brute‑force technique in which attackers attempt a small number of commonly used passwords against a large set of user accounts, rather than targeting a single account. Threat actors typically target cloud identity providers such as Azure AD, Okta, Google Workspace, and federated authentication services. 

Threat actors leverage login telemetry, exposed authentication endpoints, and automated tooling across thousands of accounts while remaining under the radar.

5. Credential Stuffing

Credential stuffing refers to an automated attack in which threat actors take previously leaked username-password pairs and systematically attempt to use them across multiple websites. Attackers leverage botnets, distributed proxy networks, and automated scripting frameworks to test millions of credentials at scale.

16 billion credentials were leaked earlier this year in one of the largest data breaches ever recorded. Attackers managed to leak passwords from Google, Facebook, and Apple accounts in a massive aggregation effort that combined multiple historical breaches, infostealer logs, and newly compromised data into a single dataset. Weak passwords accelerate this process exponentially. 

Phishing attacks are also common methods employed by threat actors to harvest credentials and login patterns through spoofed domains or landing pages that closely mimic legitimate services.

Best Practices to Improve Password Security 

The best form of security is proactive. Here are several best practices to safeguard your passwords and reduce your exposure across attack paths.

Enforce strong password policies and hygiene

This includes regularly rotating passwords across workforce applications and cloud environments, enforcing rate‑limits on authentication attempts, and detecting password reuse across internal and external services. 

Good password hygiene should involve creating passwords that are at least 16 characters long, using a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Ensure that the words can’t be found easily in a dictionary and avoid predictable sequences or repeated characters. 

A strong password manager might be worth exploring.

Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) helps MSPs prevent leaked credentials and passwords from being used to gain unauthorized access by requiring additional verification factors, such as biometrics, security keys, one-time passcodes (OTP), or push notifications to trusted devices. Implementing MFA is one of the most effective defenses against account takeover, credential stuffing, and phishing attacks.

Invest in employee security awareness

Organizations must educate employees on the risks of phishing, credential theft, and weak password practices. Conducting routine phishing simulations and employee security awareness training are several of the most effective strategies to reinforce secure behaviors, identify at-risk users, avoid unsafe login behaviors, and reduce the likelihood of successful attacks.

Phishing simulations can also help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks by training users to recognize session-hijacking attempts and report anomalous login flows that may indicate suspicious activity.

Managing Password Security with Guardz  

Don’t make an attacker’s job easy by relying on predictable or commonly used passwords, such as 123456 or qwerty. Guardz provides MSPs with a unified cybersecurity platform, which includes comprehensive phishing protection and security awareness training coverage to detect leaked credentials, monitor suspicious user activity, enforce MFA policies, and prevent exposed passwords. 

Enhance password security protection with Guardz. 

Schedule a demo today.