Everybody loves online passwords.
The sheer, unadulterated pleasure of trying to remember which one you used eleven months ago when you last thought about your car insurance, is only outweighed by the delight you experience when you’ve been through the two or three versions you use most and are told that you’ve been locked out and need to reset your password.
How can that be? You were 99% sure that you used the one that you always use. At least you can now reset the password to that one and make your life a little simpler.
But no! It appears that you did use the one that you always use; it’s just that your fat fingers mis-typed it and now the machine won’t let you use it again.
Aaaaargh!
And, to add insult to injury, now your old favourites don’t work any more because the password needs to contain uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols and a random selection of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Is it worth it? Can’t they simply leave us alone?
The answer is that it almost certainly is worth it, but that doesn’t stop it from being unbelievably boring and, if you end up being forced to write everything down and keep it in your wallet or purse (or digital version thereof), it seems to defeat the object.
In Best Eaten Cold, I quote some quite chilling statistics on poor password use. A January 2017 survey would imply that, for many people, it’s even worse. They analysed 10 million compromised passwords and found the following were the most popular
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty
- 12345678
- 111111
- 123456780
- 1234567
- password
- 123123
- 987654321
Now the firm that produced this analysis is trying to sell password management software, the data set is based on compromised passwords so they may be using data which suits them. But 10 million is a big number and 17% of them used 123456 as a password. That’s a lot.
If you’re like me, this is a subject that drives a sequence of thoughts and emotions: guilt – irritation – determination – boredom – resistance – anger – denial – dismissal – contentment.
I’m not quite ready to change my ways and, I suspect, neither are most of you.
We are, however, all wrong.