Study: Many people don't feel the need to protect their passwords

MANILA, Philippines - A recent online survey conducted by Kapersky Lab shows that many people are still not careful about their passwords.

According to the study, people have a careless attitude towards passwords because they are convinced they have no confidential information stored on their computers.

“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,” explains David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

In conducting the study, 18,000 Internet users were surveyed, 1,394 are from the Philippines while the others are from 15 other countries in the world.

Below are the significant findings from the study:

1. Only 38 percent of the surveyed population create strong new passwords for each account, while one in seven has just one password for all accounts. These users risk having several accounts simultaneously compromised in the event of a data leak.
2. The level of risk is higher for those who use just a few passwords for a larger number of accounts than those who use variations of the same password pattern.
3. One user in 10 comes up with passwords that are less than eight characters in length, while 12 percent do not try to make their passwords more difficult to guess by using, for instance, upper-case letters, numbers mixed with letters, punctuation signs or other similar tricks.
4. Consumers are putting the safety at risk by storing their passwords in easy to access or unsecured places.
5. Over half (57 percent) of respondents admitted they kept their passwords on a piece of paper, on their phones, in text files on their computers or saved them in the browser.
6. When the browser offers to save a login and password, a third (36 percent) are ready to agree, thus playing into the hands of cyber criminals or dishonest people who may get hold of their device.
7. Twenty seven percent of respondents believe that they do not need to protect their password, without realizing that passwords and logins are in themselves a favorite target of cyber criminals.