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Elderly Use More Secure Passwords Than Millennials, Says Report (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Quartz: A report released May 24 by Gigya surveyed 4,000 adults in the U.S. and U.K. and found that 18- to 34-year-olds are more likely to use bad passwords and report their online accounts being compromised. The majority of respondents ages 51 to 69 say they completely steer away from easily cracked passwords like "password," "1234," or birthdays, while two-thirds of those in the 18-to-34 age bracket were caught using those kind of terms. Quartz writes, "The diligence of the older group could help explain why 82% of respondents in this age range did not report having had any of their online accounts compromised in the past year. In contrast, 35% of respondents between 18 and 34 said at least one of their accounts was hacked within the last 12 months, twice the rate of those aged 51 to 69."
Damn.
51-69 is elderly???? Come on who wrote this.... 75 maybe, 80 even. But 50-60 is not.
I strongly suspect that 'millennials' have password protected accounts at far more places online than 51+ people. At that point it doesn't matter how strong your password is, but which shitty service stores your password as unsalted MD5 and lets the intern leave the remote login session active
is there much difference comparing against people remembering to lock their car?
Older age group has been doing it for longer. More of the older age group has encountered more people whom have been affected, heard about more cases, and been advised by more people than the younger age group. Seems reasonable.
The sixty-year old guy's password: "NowIsTheWinterOfOurDiscontent"
The thirty-year-old guy's password: "trumpsucks" ("trumpsucksbigtime" if you're lucky).
Ezekiel 23:20
Forty-nine times bitten, twice shy.
The older group are probably more likely to have their passwords written down on sticky notes under their keyboards, or stuck to their monitors.
Furthermore, the percent of hacked accounts would be hard to solve, as many younger folk are likely signed up to way more sites and services using the same password across the board. This would easier intrusion into the more secured sites.
Because they have them written on a piece of tape across the top of the monitor.
There is so much wrong with that as to be comical.
When do you ever hear about insecure passwords being compromised? That doesn't happen. They get leaked. Constantly. But not guessed, not when they can be leaked or stolen.
So how does a super-ultra-secure password help?
And then we have this odd bit of math, that 18% of the >51 age range had compromised accounts, while less than double that, 35%, of the youngest range had. Probably, but unclear because the report requires providing PII, while having four times more accounts. I'd certainly bet that the 18-to-34 age bracket has more than double the account count of the compu-geysers. (I say as someone just squeaking below that bar.)
Which would imply that, mathematically, insecure passwords are more secure. Go figure.
Millenials are the worst!
Also, women, foreigners, minorities, point-haired bosses, liberal arts majors, and really anybody who isn't an old white man with an interest in science/math! They're all the worst!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I'm nearly 60, s'pose that makes me nearly elderly.
I pick my passwords using
pwgen -y
and select from a screen full of 'memorable' passwords
Go well
...old people are on average more responsible than young people! Groundbreaking research!
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
All you need to do is call them from the IRS/FBI/Social Security and you'll have them going down to Wal-Mart to wire you as much as they allow with no trouble.
Bonus points if you can get them to send money to Mexico because their grandchildren are being held by the Federales but a small bond will get them home and out of trouble. It is the tail end of Spring Break, but a lot will believe it.
My bank? Sure, fairly secure.
Root? Good luck trying to come up with a more secure password.
Unnecessary registration to download Fallout 4 modules? lolm0dz is a perfectly fine password.
Speaking from the grave, for I am much older than 51
Much older
I always wondered why my grandfather said "Anal blaster 2 da pastor" when he died.
Anything that is financially sensitive or has access to lots of personal correspondence will require a very secure password. My email password is 26 characters. My social media one is 16. My bank password is less "secure" because they don't accept quite a few characters that Google/MS/FB accept, but it's still not something anyone is gonna spend any time cracking.
Then we get to sites like my newspaper subscription or my intramural sports login. Those are just simple dictionary words I've used since I was 12. I don't give a shit if someone hacks into those accounts. By all means log in and view my mediocre playoff record.
Simply put the account is not important, if it gets compromised I make new one. I have been using password, password1, Password1, password1!, and varieties for a decade, nothing has happened, I am not interesting enough, if nude photos of me were stolen somehow, big deal 100 million people have nude photos of themselves out there, it is almost weird not to. As far as bank information, my password password is more secure than a 4 digit pin number required if I lose a my card, or just a signature...
Computer use in the over 50 crowd is rarer the higher up you go and more restricted to the "smarter" people who were early adopters and thus, KNOW, the importance of password security.
Millenials have, what, a 99% adoption rate including all those morons you knew in grade school that ate paste!?
And what's the conclusion? Millenials iz da dumber.
Uh-huh...
As we reuse the one password that is not easy to guess, but we can remember and use since 45 years (and we know it never got "cracked").
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...we know more words.
My password "cheat sheet" purposely has typos in them, and don't explicitly say what they go to.
.docx file, not printed on paper.)
My memory is good enough to know them by heart most of the time, but for some seldom used ones, just looking at my notes is enough to remind ME. I wouldn't want to have someone take my crib notes, but the casual burglar isn't likely to be sober long enough or be patient enough to try and figure out my mess-o-letters.
(oh, and it is in an encrypted
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'm elderly and my password is so strong that I forget it in 2009 and haven't been able to log in to anything since.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Excuse me? I may be 53 years old now but I'm FAR from 'elderly' thank you very much.
And I'm not surprised I create stronger passwords & have been hacked less (none?) than a 'millennial' ...I've been at this hear 'computer thangee' since I was 18, I've seen it all, nothing today surprises me or is really 'new' (yes Matthew Broderick in War Games was my hero. :-) ).
Have fun kiddies.
Millenials are bloody stupid.
Next....
>"Elderly Use More Secure Passwords Than Millennials[...]The majority of respondents ages 51 to 69 say they completely steer away from easily cracked passwords"
Under what/whose definition is a 51-year-old "elderly"??? Was this title written by a 20-year-old or something? Even 60 is hardly "elderly". And why are there only two groups- 18-34 and 51-69? They are not equal spans? What happened to 35-50?
Yeesh
Chrono-Americans use better passwords because unlike the young, they write everything down. A user who never takes her laptop to Starbucks or to work is okay with setting up difficult passwords and then referring to a list in the silverware drawer when her grandchildren need to connect to the WiFi.
My cat has the most secure passwords ever!
If something goes wrong, mommy and daddy will fix it.
1234? That's the kind of combination an idiot would have on his luggage.
"The diligence of the older group could help explain why 82% of respondents in this age range did not report having had any of their online accounts compromised in the past year"
Did not report or have still not noticed ??
I joke...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"Elderly" started using passwords somewhere in their twenties most likely.
Millenials are still children.
http://whatisthebestpassword.c...
https://tinyurl.com/whatistheb...
https://sites.google.com/site/...
Older folks have a bigger stash and also don't have time to start over, saving money. It is logical that they are more eager to protect what they have than a generation that not only has much less but also has time to recover from a loss. Older folks need more protection.
So, as a 57 yr old, I've noticed that people tend to get more jaded as they age. We've been through some shit, and don't want it to happen again. We're not as trusting of everyone as we were in our twenties and thirties. We've been scammed, or someone close to us has, so we've learned by experience. Learning from other people's mistakes isn't easy for most humans.
Now, get the hell off of my lawn.
Just another day in Paradise
This article is stupid. Who says compromised accounts are gained by password guessing? There are many other ways:
Brute force is uncommon these days, because there is technology to limit password guessing.
This white paper requires registration to obtain. The whole thing is a poorly veiled attempt to sell the identity management solution. This isn't news. This is infomercial.
I've seen a lot of very weak passwords from my elderly users, and those that look strong are often guessable with a little research. If you know the names and birth years of their grandchildren, you probably have all you need.
and Ferris Bueller.
Just guessing here but there are probably fewer "elderly" people in that "other" group, and as statistics have shown us anomalies become more pronounced as the group size shrinks.
Or it would have shown us if any of the rest of you were paying attention.
The subject comes from my statistics professor who liked to use pies for every example. Every. Example.
Everyone knows long passwords are more secure than short ones.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
When all is said and done it makes almost no difference what password a human picks because unless that human can pick a truly random long password from a large character set then that password is weak, if for no other reason than it has human induced patterning. Of course the low hanging fruit of commonly picked passwords will be cracked first in any attack, but given time and optimisation of your guessing algorithm (guided by all the password leaks that have gone before) as much as 85% of any set of user accounts will be cracked.
The "report" is just the outcome of an online poll-- i.e. they asked people if they believed they were creating secure passwords. The only data they're tracking is based on whomever answered their survey, not an actual observation of passwords created by any age group. Honestly, as someone who deals with both targeted groups on a daily basis, I can assure you that I've seen some incredibly bad passwords, and they're typically created by people in the +50 age range.
for much of her stuff. She's super-paranoid about hacking. I've been trying to convince her that she doesn't need such strong passwords for inconsequential websites, for example. Sometimes she has to read something like 7r8guP-a+uN-sUfe over the phone to me when she needs me to login somewhere to take care of something. Hilarity ensues...
K strategies are better at security than r strategies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8N3FF_3KvU&list=PLMNj_r5bccUw40CpD-JYXJyVsDYsj7ITD
I know how we over 50s can have absolutely secure passwords that the younger hackers can't get at! Write them..in CURSIVE...