Increased online account creation increases password reuse problems

COVID-19 kept millions of people home for weeks and sometimes months last year, encouraging reliance on more online services. People shopped online, saw their doctors online, met up with friends online and more as pandemic lockdowns forced folks to find new ways to get things done. While a rising need for these services to be available spurred a rapid transition to people doing more things online, it also spurred those people into creating a whole new galaxy of online accounts. Each of those accounts required its own password – and that spawned password reuse problems that will resonate into the future. 

In a new global study conducted by Morning Consult for IBM, the technology vendor examined the impact of the pandemic on consumer security behaviors. As everyone signed up for account after account, people just got tired of trying to think up new passwords. People worldwide created an average of 15 new online accounts per person during the main thrust of the pandemic. That’s a lot of new passwords to create and remember. It also means that many more passwords were recycled or reused in 2020 than in past years making password exposure through cybercrime a strong possibility. As people created all of those new accounts, coming up with a new, strong password usually wasn’t a priority – 82% of those surveyed admitted that they had regularly reused the same passwords and credentials. 

That’s a problem for every business. Rampant password reuse and recycling is a bane for IT teams because it creates risk unnecessarily and they’ve already got more than enough to worry about. More than 80% of damaging incidents are caused by password disasters. A huge part of keeping your important business information and sensitive files safe is making good, strong passwords and reinforcing them with powerful security tools to protect them from hackers. Unfortunately, 42% of respondents in a cybercrime survey said that their organization had been compromised because of a bad, stolen, reused or cracked password in 2020, making stamping out reuse and recycling a major priority for everyone.

Fuente: ID Agent