The massive LinkedIn hack shows that people are awful at picking passwords

We know that many people are awful at picking passwords — and the huge hack of LinkedIn confirms it.

The professional social network was breached back in 2012, but it has returned to the news this week as we finally learned the true scale of it: A whopping 167 million accounts were compromised, including 117 million passwords.

The passwords were hashed, or encrypted so they can’t be read, but researchers at LeakedSource have been able to decrypt them. Their findings show just how much the same passwords get used over and over (and over and over and over and over) again.

(We first saw the LeakedSource data over on ZDNet.)

The most popular password? 123456. That was used by more than 750,000 accounts. In the No. 2 spot is the unimaginative “linkedin” (172,523), followed by “password” (144,458), and “123456789” (94,214).

The data for the top 49 passwords is below. Now hurry up and change yours.