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."

Comments

Number of accounts matters as well

[FireballX301]

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

Re:There's a time and place for secure passwords

[angel'o'sphere]

but it's still not something anyone is gonna spend any time cracking
The misconception is that people think you can 'crack a password'.
You can't.
If you try to log on on any system and fail several times it shuts you out.
So, cracking a password is only possible if the password is stored on a system, likely hashed or encrypted, and leaks. If your system is leaking password files, then you have much bigger issues than weak passwords.
See the linkedin disaster.

When I write my passwords down...

[NotQuiteReal]

My password "cheat sheet" purposely has typos in them, and don't explicitly say what they go to.

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 .docx file, not printed on paper.)