We're really bad at choosing passwords.
According to a new study by a researcher at Virginia Tech and Dashlane, a popular password manager service, most users make the same mistakes when making passwords, such as making their password the name of a popular brand or sports team.
And while these things make passwords easy to remember, they aren't all that secure, and make passwords easily guessable by hackers.
The study evaluated 6.1 million anonymized passwords gathered by Gang Wang, a computer science researcher at Virginia Tech, and analyzed by Dashlane. Those passwords come from the massive troves of user personal data that have been leaked in data breaches over the years.
Here are the most common patterns and mistakes people make, and what you should avoid: