Ashley Madison hack: top 100 passwords revealed after researchers crack them

People who used the website for would-be cheaters used passwords as weak as most other users on the internet.

The most common passwords for the site included "123456" and "password" along with sex-related phrases and a few weird ones.

Interesting phrases include "cheater" (3908), "iloveu" (3671) and "superman" (5023).

A research group cracked the encryption on over 11 million of the passwords, and released the 100 most popular ones.

The passwords were able to be exposed after Ashley Madison programmers had converted the letters of each plaintext password to lower case before hashing them. In layman's terms: they made a fatal programming mistake.

In July, a group of hackers who call themselves The Impact Team stole the identities of the tens of millions of people who use Ashley Madison.

The website, which uses the tagline "Life is Short. Have an affair", provides a matchmaking service for people already in relationships. It has more than 37 million anonymous members.

More than 910,000 accounts on the infidelity site are from Australia, according to a Business Insider article from last year.

THE TOP 100 PASSWORDS

123456
12345
password
DEFAULT
123456789
qwerty
12345678
abc123
pussy
1234567
696969
ashley
f...me
football
baseball
f...you
111111
1234567890
ashleymadison
password1
madison
asshole
superman
mustang
harley
654321
123123
hello
monkey
000000
hockey
letmein
11111
soccer
cheater
kazuga
hunter
shadow
michael
121212
666666
iloveyou
qwertyuiop
secret
buster
horny
jordan
hosts
zxcvbnm
asdfghjkl
affair
dragon
987654
liverpool
bigd...
sunshine
yankees
asdfg
freedom
batman
whatever
charlie
f...off
money
pepper
jessica
asdfasdf
1qaz2wsx
987654321
andrew
qazwsx
dallas
55555
131313
abcd1234
anthony
steelers
asdfgh
jennifer
killer
cowboys
master
jordan23
robert
maggie
looking
thomas
george
matthew
7777777
amanda
summer
qwert
princess
ranger
william
corvette
jackson
tigger
computer

Fairfax Media