As the World Cup begins in Qatar, new data has revealed how common passwords often contain a popular player, country, or World Cup-related term.

Password management and user authentication solutions provider Specops Software has released its findings as the World Cup kicks off.

According to the research, which analysed over 800 million compromised passwords, it was found that ‘Kane’, possibly in reference to England forward Harry Kane, was third in the list of most popular names. In total, Kane appeared within breached password lists over 133,000 times.

Digging deeper into the most common names listed, among the top 20 included Grzegorz ‘Lato’ (no.1), Thierry ‘Henry’ (no.5), ‘Pele’ (no.11), Bobby ‘Moore’ (no.13), Lionel ‘Messi’ (no.14) and Ronaldo’ (no.18).

While it is impossible to know the reason behind a password choice, there’s a high probability that many users base their choices on someone or something memorable, such as a famous footballer or their favourite team.

Further analysis was conducted on which countries that qualified for the 2022 World Cup appeared in the breached password database, and found the ‘USA’ at the top, appearing over 1.3 million times.

This number was followed by ‘Iran’ and ‘France’ in second and third places respectively, with ‘Japan’ and ‘Canada rounding the top five. ‘England’ featured in ninth place with slightly more than 20,300 appearances.

‘Soccer’ topped the most breached password lists in the other-football-related category. The term made over 140,000 appearances, surpassing the other top three terms ‘football’ and ‘FIFA’ combined.

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Darren James, Technical Lead at Specops Software said: “Once again, we see users scoring an own goal when it comes to making password decisions. As passwords form at least one factor, or provide a “fallback”, in most MFA solutions, we recommend switching to a long and strong passphrase wherever possible.

“Weak or easily guessable words, such a local or popular sports teams, that might be followed by users in your organisation, can be tackled by blocking them within a password dictionary”

With millions of people around the world watching the 2022 Qatar World Cup for the next four weeks, security experts warn that hackers will utilise the opportunity to target unsuspecting victims. The same can be said for other professional sporting events and even superhero movie premieres.

Using commonly known terms or phrases for passwords is seen as low hanging fruit for cybercriminals, as the passwords frequently appear on leaked lists on the dark web and are then used in attacks in order to gain unauthorised access to user accounts and networks.

And hackers disproportionally target younger people, according to research conducted earlier this year by digital identity specialists GBG in its new State of Digital Identities 2022 report.

The report has warned that younger consumers are the group most at risk of falling victim to identity fraud, and millions of those expected to watch the Qatar World Cup will be young people.

GBG found that around 92% of people said that they were concerned they’ll eventually be hit by identity fraud, while 19% said they were extremely concerned.

Additionally, data showed that around 9% of respondents believed that they had been the victim of identity theft in the past year and a further 18% couldn’t be sure if they had been scammed or not.

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