The breaches won’t stop coming – Equifax, Yahoo!, MyFitnessPal. The list goes on. We’ve become accustomed to seeing these breaches in the news over the past few years. So we were curious: Have individuals’ password behavior evolved and become more secure? Are employees more vigilant now about password security than in 2016, when we conducted our first survey on the topic?
That’s what we set out to determine in our Psychology of Passwords research. Again, we partnered with Lab42 to survey adults around the world on their attitudes and behaviors around password security. The results? We were surprised to find that password behaviors remain largely unchanged from two years ago. We continue to see some pretty risky behaviors. Top of the list is denial: only 55% would update their password if that account had been hacked. And ignorance: almost 50% do not create different passwords for personal and work accounts.
As with the previous results, fear is driving much of this behavior. Sure, there is fear of data breaches when discovered in the news and of risks to personal online security. However, the fear of forgetting one’s password tops it all, in turn causing 59% of people to use the same or similar password for multiple accounts. Password reuse continues to rear its ugly, ugly head.
With such poor password hygiene, it’s no surprise that hackers are taking advantage of the doors we’re leaving open for them. Check out the infographic below featuring results from the latest Psychology of Passwords research, and download the eBook for the complete results.
