Study: We've Got More Clean Underwear than Passwords
Most people are taught from a young age to keep a robust supply of clean underwear and to frequently change the pair they're wearing, but it appears that few of us practice that same habit regarding passwords.
According to a new survey, 4 out of 5 people in certain European countries claim to have more pairs of underpants than they do unique passwords, which points either to rampant recycling of passwords or to colossal collections of underpants.
The survey, commissioned by the London public-relations firm Hotwire and titled "The compared perceptions of passwords and underwear," also found that 74 percent of respondents would feel more exposed leaving the house sans underwear than if their personal data were stored without password protection (26 percent).
MORE: 12 Computer Security Mistakes You're Probably Making
The survey was conducted by the French public polling group Ifop and questioned more than 7,000 Europeans spread roughly evenly across France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark. Survey questions revolved around how users felt about their passwords and their undergarments, to see which had a greater priority in day-to-day life.
A separate, non-scientific study conducted online by Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab queried more than 18,000 people worldwide through a quiz regarding Internet security (you can take it yourself here). In that study, 1 in 7 respondents said they used the same password for each and every online account they had. That's a terrible idea -- if a frequently reused password is guessed, stolen or leaked in a data breach, the other accounts for which it is used are as good as unprotected.
David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said in a statement that such sloppy security stems from both a lack of education about best security practices and a preference towards convenience.
"Unfortunately, many people don't have a very good understanding of the scale of Internet threats and are not serious enough about protecting their personal data online, significantly increasing the risk of losing it," Emm said.
The Ifop survey revealed that we, or at least residents of western Europe, change our undies much more frequently than we do our passwords. Respondents who claimed to change their passwords every three months were in the clear minority (35.9 percent), compared the stark majority (87.1 percent) that claimed to change their underwear on a daily basis. For what it's worth, Danish respondents claimed to change their undergarments the least frequently, with only 84 percent saying they swapped out their skivvies every day.
In a company blog posting, Kaspersky's Kate Kochetkova commented on both studies, and offered three pieces of advice. The first two are that users should create passwords using complex strings of characters that don't contain words commonly found in dictionaries, and that users should not share passwords with anyone else. Over half (55.7 percent) of those surveyed in the Ifop report claimed they never had and would never share their passwords with close relatives, while even more (73.7 percent) said they had not and would never share their undies with a relative.
Kochetkova also endorsed the use of password-management software, such as Kaspersky Password Manager. This is valid advice in theory, as password managers provide convenience and a means of organizing dozens, even hundreds, of passwords, which limits the impact if a password is compromised in a data breach.
But putting all of your security eggs into one basket also creates risk. Your master password, which unlocks the rest of the passwords, could be forgotten or stolen. And as we've recently seen, password-manager programs themselves can be hacked. Using a password manager creates both a single point of failure and a big fat target for malware and identity thieves; it's certainly a better practice than using a single password for all accounts, but it might not be better than writing all your passwords down a piece of paper that you keep in a safe.
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