Passwords reused by 6 of 10 consumers
Passwords remain a brittle security blanket when wielded by many consumers, a new survey has found. Despite routine web breaches, six out of ten continue to reuse the same few passwords over and over.
The survey results from US fraud-detection vendor CSID shouldn't be surprising. As well as risky password re-use which makes multiple sites vulnerable from a single breach, 54 percent of respondents had only five passwords or fewer while 44 percent changed these once a year or less.
No surprise to report that the most reckless use of passwords was among users under 24 years old. The small number of passwords seems to be driven in part by the fact most users access fewer than half dozen sites, although memorization issues are a concern for more than half which underlines that few bother to use secure password vaults to ease this hassle.
