The Blog of Harald

“blog.org”:http://blog.org/archives/cat_security_and_encryption.html#000745 → “The Register”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/30324.html :

bq. Nine in ten (90 per cent) of office workers at London’s Waterloo Station gave away their computer password for a cheap pen, compared with 65 per cent last year.

bq. Workers were asked a series of questions which included: What is your password? Three in four (75 per cent) of people immediately gave their password.

bq. If they initially refused they were asked which category their password fell into and then asked a further question to find out the password.

bq. A further 15 percent were then prepared to give over their passwords, after the most rudimentary of social engineering tricks were applied.

bq. The most common password was “password” (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent).

We put a lot of time and effort into getting the security right in our software. It’s nice to know that all that effort isn’t going to waste; people are forced to give away their passwords in order to compromise the system :-)

(That’s sar- I say, that’s sarcasm, boy.)