Crappy Passwords Very Common

KeatonMill writes "CNN released this story about passwords. Apparently, a group of UK psychologists did a study about password selection, and found that many passwords can be guessed if access to the subject's desk is allowed (the article gives an example of sports memoribilia representing sports-related passwords). According to the study, 50 percent of people use names of family members or pets as passwords."

Comments

In other news...

[bwulf]

... water found to be wet[1], sky found to be blue, Earth found to be round[2] and CNN found to be obvious.

[1] at certain temperatures
[2] well, almost

People don't get password security

[defile]

I went to my bank the other day to assign a PIN to my ATM card. For this you need to sit down with a bank person at their desk. Just to be a pain in the ass, I asked her how many numbers I could enter (it's 7). She said 4. I entered 7 and it took.

Then she went "How do you remember 7 numbers?" and I said "The same way I'd remember 4 numbers. It's not like remembering yet another set of numbers is going to be hard--I've memorized the passwords of at least 20 other services".

To which the lady at the bank said "See, the best way is to just use the same password for EVERYTHING. This way you only need to remember one!"

Re:How to pick a good password

[Tony Hoyle]

MY boss does this using nursery rhymes. Sometimes when he's on holiday we have to get into his machine... you end up with half a dozen geeks reciting nursery rhymes to each other until the correct permutation is reached.

What about the inverse?

[dsb3]

I once named a pet (it was a fish, in fact) after one of my passwords. Shame it wasn't one of the more pronounceable ones.