Password Security: Why Most Passwords Are Weak and How to Create Strong Ones

If you use a password like password123, qwerty, or your pet's name followed by a birth year, you are not alone — but you are at serious risk. A 2023 study by NordPass found that the most common password in the world is still "123456", used by over 4.5 million people. According to Google, 65% of people reuse the same password across multiple sites. This is the single biggest security mistake you can make online.

This guide breaks down exactly what makes a password weak or strong, how attackers crack them, and how you can protect yourself — using free tools that run entirely in your browser with no data ever sent to a server.

The Most Common Passwords — Are Yours on This List?

Every year, security researchers analyze billions of leaked credentials from data breaches. The results are consistently alarming. Here are the top offenders that appear in virtually every breach database:

• 123456 / 12345678 / 123456789
• password / password1 / Password123
• qwerty / qwerty123 / qwertyuiop
• iloveyou / letmein / welcome
• admin / root / user / login
• abc123 / 111111 / 000000
• monkey / dragon / master / sunshine

What is especially dangerous is that many people believe they are being clever by substituting letters with numbers — writing p@ssw0rd instead of password. Attackers know this trick too. Modern cracking tools include "mangling rules" that automatically apply these substitutions to every word in their dictionary.

What Makes a Password Weak?

Password weakness comes from predictability. A password is weak when an attacker can guess it faster than trying every possible combination. The main culprits are:

1. Short Length

Length is the single most important factor in password strength. A 6-character password using only lowercase letters has just 308 million possible combinations — a modern GPU can exhaust that in under a second. An 8-character password with mixed case and numbers has 218 trillion combinations, which sounds impressive, but modern cracking rigs running at billions of guesses per second can still crack it in minutes.

2. Dictionary Words

Any real word in any language is immediately vulnerable to a dictionary attack. This includes words with obvious substitutions (3 for e, 0 for o, @for a) and words with numbers appended at the end (monkey1, dragon99). Attackers have dictionaries with hundreds of millions of these variations pre-computed.

3. Personal Information

Names, birthdays, anniversaries, pet names, and favorite sports teams are extremely common password ingredients. If an attacker knows anything about you — from your social media profiles alone — they can create a targeted wordlist and dramatically reduce the time needed to crack your password.

4. Patterns and Keyboard Walks

Sequences like qwerty, asdfgh, 1qaz2wsx, or zxcvbn are keyboard patterns that crackers test in the first few seconds. They require no additional intelligence to guess — just knowledge of a keyboard layout.

How Password Cracking Actually Works

Understanding how attackers crack passwords helps you understand why certain practices actually protect you and why others only feel safe.

Brute Force Attacks

A brute force attack tries every single possible combination of characters until it finds the right one. For short passwords, this is trivially fast. For longer ones, the time grows exponentially. A 12-character password using uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols has roughly 19 septillion possible combinations — at a billion guesses per second, that would take over 600 years to fully exhaust. This is the power of length.

Dictionary Attacks

Rather than trying every combination, dictionary attacks use pre-built lists of known passwords, common words, and leaked credentials from previous breaches. The RockYou wordlist alone — leaked in 2009 — contains 14 million passwords and is still the starting point for most cracking sessions today. If your password has ever been used by anyone before and appeared in a breach, it is in a dictionary somewhere.

Rainbow Tables

When websites store passwords, they should store them as cryptographic hashes — not the actual password. Rainbow tables are pre-computed lookup tables that map hash values back to the original passwords. If a site stores passwords without "salting" the hashes (adding a random value before hashing), a rainbow table attack can recover millions of passwords in seconds. This is why data breaches are so devastating.

Password Entropy: Why Length Wins Every Time

Entropy is a measure of unpredictability, expressed in bits. The higher the entropy, the more time it takes to crack a password by brute force. Here is how it works in practice:

• A password using only lowercase letters (26 characters) adds about 4.7 bits of entropy per character.
• Adding uppercase doubles the set to 52 characters — 5.7 bits per character.
• Adding digits (62 characters) — 5.95 bits per character.
• Adding symbols (95 printable ASCII characters) — 6.57 bits per character.

But the multiplier effect of length is far more powerful than any single character type addition. A 12-character fully random password from the full printable ASCII set has about 79 bits of entropy. At 16 characters, that becomes 105 bits — effectively uncrackable with any foreseeable technology.

The Three Types of Passwords People Use

Most people's password strategies fall into one of three categories — each with its own tradeoffs:

Type 1: Easy to Remember, Easy to Crack

This is the fluffy2009! category — a pet name, a year, and a punctuation mark. You can remember it without effort. An attacker can crack it in under an hour with a decent wordlist and mangling rules. These passwords offer almost no real protection.

Type 2: Complex But Impossible to Remember

Some people try to create truly complex passwords by mashing their keyboard — xK3#mQ9!pL — but then find they cannot remember it. This leads to writing it on a sticky note, storing it in an unencrypted text file, or simply resetting it constantly. The security gain is lost through poor storage.

Type 3: Strong and Properly Stored

This is the only approach that actually works at scale. Generate a long, fully random password and store it in a password manager. You only need to remember one strong master password. The rest are generated, stored, and filled in for you automatically. This is how security professionals manage hundreds of accounts.

Visual Strength Comparison

Here is a side-by-side look at how dramatically password strength varies:

The difference between the first and third passwords is not just incremental — it is the difference between no protection and virtually unbreakable security. And you do not need to remember v8K#mX2qLn&4jR7— your password manager does that for you.

Check Your Current Password Strength Instantly

Before you change anything, it is worth understanding exactly how strong your current passwords are. SoftStash offers a free, private password strength checker that analyzes your password locally — the characters you type never leave your browser.

The checker gives you a clear score with an explanation of what is weak and what to improve. It is the fastest way to get an honest audit of the passwords you are already using.

Generate Strong Passwords With One Click

Knowing what a strong password looks like and actually creating one are two different problems. The human brain is notoriously bad at generating randomness — we always fall back on patterns, familiar words, and predictable structures. The solution is to let a machine generate the randomness for you.

The SoftStash Password Generator creates cryptographically random passwords using your browser's built-in secure random number generator. You can customize:

• Password length (up to 128 characters)
• Character sets to include: uppercase, lowercase, digits, symbols
• Exclusion of ambiguous characters (like 0, O, l, 1) for easier manual transcription
• Number of passwords to generate at once

Why You Need a Password Manager

The number one objection to using strong passwords is memorability. "I can't remember 30 different 20-character random strings." You're right — and you shouldn't have to. That is exactly what password managers are for.

A password manager is an encrypted vault that stores all your passwords. You unlock it with one strong master password (the only one you need to memorize), and it handles everything else:

• Stores unlimited passwords securely with end-to-end encryption
• Auto-fills login forms in your browser
• Generates new strong passwords when you create accounts
• Alerts you when a password has been exposed in a known breach
• Syncs across all your devices securely

Popular options include Bitwarden (open-source and free), 1Password, and KeePass (fully local). The important thing is to use any of them — the security improvement over no manager is enormous.

Two-Factor Authentication: Why Passwords Alone Are Not Enough

Even the strongest password has one fundamental vulnerability: it can be stolen without being cracked. Phishing attacks, keyloggers, man-in-the-middle attacks, and data breaches can expose your password without any brute force involved. Once an attacker has your password, length and complexity are irrelevant.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds a second layer that protects you even if your password is compromised. Common forms include:

• TOTP apps (Google Authenticator, Authy): Generate a 6-digit code that changes every 30 seconds. Even with your password, an attacker cannot log in without the current code.
• Hardware keys (YubiKey): A physical device you plug in or tap. Phishing-resistant because the key verifies the site's domain before authenticating.
• SMS codes: Better than nothing, but vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks. Use an authenticator app instead when possible.

Enable 2FA on every account that supports it — especially email, banking, cloud storage, and social media. A strong password plus 2FA makes unauthorized access extremely difficult even for well-resourced attackers.

A Complete Password Security Checklist

• Use a minimum of 16 characters for every password
• Use a different password on every site and service
• Never use dictionary words, names, or personal information
• Use a password manager to generate and store all passwords
• Enable two-factor authentication everywhere it is available
• Check your existing passwords with a strength checker today
• Check if your email has appeared in known breaches (haveibeenpwned.com)
• Never share passwords via email, text, or messaging apps

Start Right Now — It Takes 2 Minutes

You do not need to overhaul everything at once. Start with your most critical accounts: email, banking, and your primary social media. Replace those passwords first using the SoftStash Password Generator, then check the strength of what you already have using the Password Strength Checker.

Both tools run entirely in your browser. Your passwords are never transmitted, logged, or stored anywhere outside your own device. That is the SoftStash promise — powerful tools that genuinely respect your privacy.