Your parents pick better passwords than you do

[Corey]

Computer users over the age of 55 employ passwords that are twice as secure as passwords used by those under 25 years old. A recent study conducted by Joseph Bonneau, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, analyzed almost 70 million passwords belonging to Yahoo users around the world. Ensuring that data was kept anonymous and passwords could not be tied to individual accounts, Bonneau looked at password strength alongside other data such as age and locale. Beyond the relationship between age and security, the researcher found that German and Korea speakers generally use the strongest passwords, and the presence of credit card data on a user’s account seemingly does not prompt that user to avoid weak passwords such as “123456.” Bonneau’s study was the largest of its kind, and he unveiled his findings at the Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco, California earlier this month.

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[CaulkLiquor]

... how many 55 yesr olds know 1337?

[->RoGue]

How do people only have a 10 bit password? That doesn't even make sense. At 6 characters long, that would only be a symbol set of 3 characters. It's roughly equivalent to just choosing a number between 0 and 1000 as your password.

 

It also matters what method hackers are using to break your password. If they're using brute force bit-guessing, then you're better off with a longer keyphrase made out of easier to remember words. If they're simply guessing a keyphrase, you're likely better off with a randomized password.

 

-RoGue

[ajnl]

uhhh they are yahoo users!? Of course they're gonna be stupid. Check gmail, I am 100% sure it will be a difference story.

[beedub]

I wonder if my Parent really fall into that catagory. We always got into my Dan's brief case when we were little because the lock code was our address number. He had his ATM card stolen one time and the theif was able to get money out of the ATM. My dad was just baffled that they were able to guess his PIN. I thought back to the briefcase and figured he probalby used something obvious.