Weak Password
According to yahoo!News, the statistics of 28,000 passwords that are recently stolen from a popular US website that is posted in physorg.com “16 percent took a first name as a password … 14 percent relied on the easiest keyboard combinations to remember such as ‘1234’ ….” People tend to use passwords that are easy to remember such as names, their favorite words, etc. Since most people have many accounts, in order to manage their log in passwords, they intend to chose easy remember password.
One way to prevent people from using weak password is for them to have a built-in password checker when the users register new account or wanted to change their passwords(like the one that is posted here). There should a requirement for the password length and combination. A secure password has to be at least 8 characters long and it “should include a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.” Moreover, it would be helpful if there are short side note on how to create secure password.
The attacker can compromise people’s accounts using these easy-to-remember passwords and they have about 40 percent chance to get it correct. Other than that, users tend to write their passwords down on their notes or PC. By doing this, attackers can easily get access to users’ computers and get their passwords.
If people think that their account for a website is not that important to them, they won’t even bother to change their passwords to stronger ones. They believe that even though they have weak passwords, their accounts won’t be attacked. On the other hand, people would probably change their weak passwords to more complex ones for financial account such as banking account or private account like Gmail.