In January of this year, Imperva’s ADC published a report on the most commonly used passwords.  Of the 32 million, nearly 2 million were in Spanish.  Agua Marketing—a firm that specializes in marketing to Spanish speakers—helped us analyze the list.  They found many passwords and patterns.  If you read Spanish, you can access our report here.

Of the 32 million passwords, a significant portion, 1,830,196, were identified as Spanish which included passwords that could be bilingual, such as ‘chocolate’ which is spelled the same in English and Spanish as well as universal sequences like ‘abc123’.  The purely Spanish words totaled 1,001,662 including all Spanish words, proper names and intentionally misspelled expressions.  

The tricky part:  we have no way of knowing who was a native Spanish speaker.  If we had usernames, that would have helped--but they were unavailable.  However, to our knowledge, no one has ever had such a large pool of Spanish passwords to analyze.  The frequency of use of the passwords was very relevant: it gave us insight into the types of passwords selected by Spanish-speaking users.  

Key findings?  Spanish speakers devised passwords based on:

• Names of persons
• Keyboard sequences
• Favorite things such as movie characters, food, etc…
• Terms of endearment
• Computer terms
• Religious terms