Why is Sojdlg123aljg a common password?

Question

I was going through the list of top 100K passwords and found Sojdlg123aljg near the top of the list. Does anyone have any idea why this is such a common password?

Answer 1

One of the most logical explanations is that those accounts were associated with a bot. Same goes for password like 18atcskd2w.

Graham Cluley wrote an article about this: So, Just Why Is 18atcskd2w Such a Popular Password?

Can so many people really be choosing to protect their online accounts with the same, seemingly random choice of “18atcskd2w”, “3rjs1la7qe,” or “q0tsrbv488”?

The answer, of course, is no. People are not choosing those passwords.

Yes, those credentials can be found amongst the stolen data, and those passwords are being used on many tens of thousands of accounts, but it wasn’t a human being who chose that password. It was a computer.

Human brains were responsible for choosing passwords like “123456”, “password,” and “qwerty.” But there is no way that 91,103 people independently chose to secure their accounts with “18atcskd2w.”

Instead, what I believe happened is that these accounts were created by bots, perhaps with the intention of posting spam onto the forums.

Edit:

Ok, I went to check some of records ("dumps") from breached websites:

ilerrhyc@qgjkwntm.com:18atcskD2W
lprfzoyj@aboriaqk.com:18atcskD2W
ytjcvfhx@erbnxkjx.com:18atcskD2W
imuudluz@qsldpvlx.com:18atcskD2W
rrrowvvn@gdcufxsg.com:18atcskD2W
kixtigma@snjkuxjh.com:18atcskD2W

I'm pretty sure that those passwords were associated with bot, but funny thing is that attacker used random username with random-non-existing domain, but non-random password.

Answer 2

Another possibility : Sojdlg123aljg is latin characters translation from another alphabet.

For instance, a common password "ji32k7au4a83" is from mandarin "我的密碼", meaning "my password" (source).

Using this online keyboard, you can validate that typing successively j-i-3 maps to 我. However it does not works for Soj... So either it is a different language, or the other answer is right.

Answer 3

One of the misleading things about password statistics is that the most common passwords may not in fact be that common. The passwords 123456 and password are always among the top passwords, but that doesn't mean that you'll see them in the wild that much.

In 2014 I compiled the top passwords list for SplashData and wrote an article about some of the anomalies you see on password lists. In that article I wrote this:

While 123456 is indeed the most common password, that statistic is a bit misleading. Although 0.6% of all users on my list used that password, it’s important to remember that 99.4% of the users on my list didn’t use that password. What is noteworthy here is that while the top passwords are still the top passwords, the number of people using those passwords has dramatically decreased.

and

In 2014, all it takes for a password to get on the top 1000 list is to be used by just 0.0044% of all users.

What this means is that as more people avoid common passwords, other anomalies pop up such as accounts created by bots, hackers, or admins who assign the same default password to everyone.

This last case is one example I used:

For example, when I first ran my stats for 2014, the password lonen0 ranked as #7 in the list. Looking through the data I saw that all of these passwords came from a single source, the Belgium company EASYPAY GROUP, which had their data leaked in November of 2014. Looking through the raw data it appears that lonen0 was a default password that 10% of their users failed to set to something stronger. It’s just 10% of users from one company but that was enough to push it to the #7 most common password in my data set.

As others have pointed out, this was most likely a bot but could also have been a hacker who compromised the system. This was pretty common with paid content sites (i.e., porn) where someone would hack the site and create a bunch of accounts with different usernames and the same password. This could have been to avoid detection or to allow for tracking, but was also common for claiming certain accounts, as was very common in certain IRC channels and forums that shared passwords (i.e., forzealots or xphkrew).