Fans of Chiefs’ AFC West rivals among worst at password security, study finds
Chiefs fans are smarter than their AFC West counterparts in at least one key part of life: They don’t use their favorite team’s name as a password as frequently as Raiders, Broncos and Chargers supporters.
Global Dots, which said it aims to provide “cutting-edge cloud solutions to businesses worldwide,” looked into password leaks involving sports team names and ranked them from most to least frequent.
No. 1 on the list among NFL passwords were variants of ones that used the Dallas Cowboys, followed closely by the Las Vegas Raiders. The Denver Broncos are sixth and the Las Angeles Chargers are 12th. The Chiefs are 25th with 15,960 password leaks. By comparison, the Raiders’ name was part of 185,665 leaks.
This is a methodology for the study: “This dataset ranks 186 sports teams, based on how vulnerable the passwords are which include team names. To do this, 23 different password variations were used.. Once the data for the password variations was collected, the different variations for each team were summed, to provide each team a total number of password leaks. The teams were then ranked from highest to lowest, based on the number of leaks.
“How many times the password had appeared in a data breach was taken” from a website that has passwords that were part of a data breach.
Using the Buffalo Bills as an example, Global Dots looked at variations on passwords that have been hacked, such as buffalobills123!, Buff@l0B1lls, BillsFan, BuffaloBills!, BuffaloBills123! and GoBills.
The New York Yankees was the most hacked name among MLB teams, while the Oklahoma City Thunder was first in NBA team names.
This story was originally published April 8, 2025 at 12:03 PM.
