Hacker alert for NJ, PA residents — If these are your passwords, change them right now

Question: How many different passwords do you have these days?

You likely have a password for any number of email addresses, passwords for banking apps, passwords for stuff at home, passwords at work, passwords for credit cards, passwords for streaming services, maybe even passwords for meaningless things that shouldn't even have passwords.

It's exhausting after a while. And confusing — especially when sites make you use a minimum of 18 characters with at least seven capital letters, 8 special !&%$@#*&@ characters, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

While that's all a big pain, a new study is shining a very bright spotlight on exactly why companies make you jump through all of those hoops just to watch Netflix.

According to NordPass, which is a product of NordVPN, of the world's 20 most common passwords, 17 can be cracked in less than one second.

What does that mean? All of your personal information can literally disappear in the blink of an eye. And if you think the regular internet can be a scary place, the dark web will blow your mind with how quickly your data can be bought and sold.

Sadly, these passwords are used millions and millions of times by people in New Jersey and beyond.

As it turns out, the most popular passwords are some of the laziest combinations of letters and/or numbers that you can think of.

Peruse this list, and if you use any of these passwords, you probably want to change them right away.