Password hacking as easy as 123...

Photo / Supplied

Hackers have posted a list of the most commonly used passwords on a popular gossip website, sending a warning to internet users not to use obvious words.

Of the gawker.com users hacked, 123456 is the most-used password, while the next popular is ... password.

Demonstrating why you should not use the same password for multiple websites, the hackers used those they had gained from gawker to break into Twitter accounts.

Lloyd Borrett, an adviser to internet security company AVG, said he was "not surprised whatsoever" by the use of obvious passwords.

Every time there were studies conducted around passwords, the most common choices were a run of numbers and "password", he said.

"That's the problem, People don't think about having a secure password."

Mr Borrett advised people to use different passwords for different sites and write their passwords down and keep them in their wallet. He also advised people to log off websites when they finish using them and to use "strong" passwords that were not easy to guess, combining numbers with letters and symbols and lower and upper cases.

TOP

1 012345

2 password

3 12345678

4 lifehack

5 qwerty

6 abc123

7 111111

8 monkey

9 consumer

10 12345