Pets' names used as passwords by millions, study finds

General Developer Forum In The News
,
1

Millions of British people are using their pet’s name as their online password, despite it being an easy target for hackers, a survey has found.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said 15% of the population used pets’ names, 14% use a family member’s name, and 13% pick a notable date.

And 6% of people are still using “password” as all - or a part - of their password.

The NCSC urged people to choose random words that cannot be guessed instead.

Other problematic passwords included a sports team the user supported (6%), a string of numbers such as “123456” (6%), or a favourite TV show (5%).

Some 40% of respondents said they had never used one of these easily-guessed items as part of a password…

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

1 Like
2

Corresponding tweet for this thread:

Share link for this tweet.

1 Like
3

This just in! According to the latest research, humans are, by and large, unbelievably stupid!

In other news, physicists at CERN have determined that water is wet, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

1 Like
4

I sometimes name things with the names of my pets, such as hostnames for servers :smiley:

Never used them for passwords tho :upside_down_face:

2 Likes
5

That makes perfectly good sense in a home or very small business. When you get to the stage where the “cattle, not pets” approach applies to your servers, then a different naming scheme makes better sense, but still not for security reasons.

1 Like