Password Facts: Luke Wroblewski of Luke W Ideation & Design offers the following enlightening facts about password usage and security:
• The average person has between 7 and 25 accounts that they log into every day.
• People report authenticating about 15 times in a typical work day on average.
• 86% of U.S. companies use password authentication.
• 70% of people do not use a unique password for each Web site.
• Around 82% of people have forgotten a password used on a Web site.
• 4.28% of Yahoo users forgot their passwords over a three month period.
• Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities.
• The top 5 passwords at Gawker (based on released records) accounted for roughly 1 in 4 passwords. The top password, 123456, came in at over 3,000 uses within the dataset of 188,279.
• A survey of 34,000 MySpace passwords revealed that the most common were “password1″, “abc123″, “myspace1″, and “password”. (For a complete list of sources for the above facts, visit Luke W’s blog.)