These top 10 countries create the strongest passwords

Italians are the best when it comes to understanding how to create a strong password. According to the National Privacy Test by NordVPN, Italians’ knowledge of strong passwords scored the highest.

Here are the top 10 countries whose citizens create the strongest passwords:

1. Italy 94.3 (score out of 100)

2. Switzerland 94

3. Spain 93.5

4. Germany 93.3

5. France 92.3

6. Denmark 91.8

7. UK 90.7

8. Belgium 90.4

9. Canada 89.4

10. USA 89.3

Countries that didn’t make the top 10 list were Australia (88.9), South Africa (86.2), Saudi Arabia (85.7), Russia (81.4), Brazil (81.2), Turkey (73.9), and India (78.4).

“What this study shows is that people all around the world actually know how to create a strong password. The sad news is that, while the knowledge is there, the actions are different,” says Chad Hammond, security expert at NordPass. “Year over year, people create extremely poor passwords. This year’s most common password was “123456”, and it was used more than 2.5 million times.”

Back in November 2020, NordPass published a study exploring which passwords netizens use most often. The research revealed that people generally still use easy-to-remember passwords, including their own names, favorite sports, foods, easy-to-guess number combinations, and other uncomplicated passwords.

The research evaluated 275,699,516 passwords, of which only 122,894,788 were unique. This is only 44% of unique passwords.

“Using unique passwords is incredibly important, and it’s scary that a lot of people still don’t do that. It’s important to create unique passwords for every account. When we reuse passwords, we put at risk all the accounts that have the same password: in case of a data breach, one jeopardized account would compromise the rest,” says Chad Hammond, security expert at NordPass.

Apart from using unique passwords, the security expert advises making them complicated or employing a password generator to make sure they are impossible to guess. He also recommends using 2FA if possible. Whether it’s an app, biometric data, or hardware security key, the accounts will be much safer when you add that extra layer of protection.