More than 64 percent of people use the same password for some, or even all, of their online accounts, while only 21 percent use a different password for each account, according to a news report in the UK.
Key findings include:
- 21 percent of respondents say that they used personal information such as their favorite football team, their pet’s name or birthdays when creating passwords, which is risky because this type of information can often be found on social media sites.
- 43 percent say that the number of different passwords that they had to remember was ‘overwhelming’ and 30 percent say they had at least 10 different accounts.
- 8 percent say that trying to remember all their passwords was more stressful than a divorce or changing jobs.
- 40 percent say that they ‘remembered’ their passwords, followed by 20 percent who prefer to write them down on a piece of paper. Only a few (eight percent) say that they use a password manager, a single sign-on service like Facebook or Google (four percent) or keep them on a document in the cloud (one percent).
- 45 percent of users include special characters in their passwords such as @ or $, while 32 percent say their passwords contain fewer than eight letters. Most passwords (35 percent) have up to ten characters, while 16 percent are the most security-conscious, with over 12 characters.
