By Ruta Pauliukonyte
Cybernews’ research team examined billions of passwords from over 200 cybersecurity incidents, revealing that individuals frequently select US states as their passwords. Carolina, Dakota, and Texas are the most popular and appear in thousands, even millions, of analyzed passwords, making them not a reliable choice for account security.
Being proud of your state makes you more likely to get hacked
Even though everything is bigger in Texas, it is not the biggest and best choice for a password. And even though Texas appeared in passwords around 1M times, it only came out third on the list. Surprisingly, even California, the most populated state in the US, only ranked 11th on the wordlist (p. 18), with 556.9K uses.
Carolina (1.9M) and Dakota (1.2M) are the two most popular US states that will not keep hackers away. At least one of these states will appear once around every 6K passwords. Interestingly, the number of times Alaska is mentioned in passwords is almost the same as that of its residents.
The ten most popular states used in passwords
You can find the ten most popular states and how often they were named in passwords here:
Carolina — 1,921,229
Dakota — 1,171,849
Texas — 1,067,634
NewYork — 968,905
Florida — 879,400
Montana — 795,246
Maine — 783,380
Georgia — 710,455
Alaska — 674,948
Hawaii — 589,977
Network Assured released a report listing the 10 US states with the most data breaches, both historically and in 2022. The data shows that Texas was the third-worst state for data breaches, with 581 reported incidents, despite having the highest state cybersecurity budget at US$800 million. Not only does Texas rank third overall in the report, but it also ranked high in Cybernews research, being the third most mentioned state in passwords. These statistics suggest that investing heavily in cybersecurity alone may not solve issues caused by poor human practices unless resources are used effectively.
However, some states appeared in passwords the least number of times. States and combinations like “NorthDakota,” “SouthDakota,” “NewHampshire,” “SouthCarolina,” “WestVirginia,” “Massachusetts,” “RhodeIsland,” “Pennsylvania,” “NorthCarolina,” and “NewMexico” were mentioned only about 3K times each.
The combinations mentioned above, especially those containing two words, are safer than the most popular states, but aren’t the safest option. Even though they are longer than eight characters and include both lower-case and upper-case letters, passwords should also incorporate numbers and special characters to reduce the risk of being leaked. Tools like the Password leak checker are available to check if a password has been compromised.
