The company said: “Of the 172 office workers surveyed many explained the origin of their passwords, such as ‘my team – Spurs,’ ‘my name – Charlie,’ ‘my car -minicooper,’ ‘my cat’s name – Tinks.’ The most common password categories were family names such as partners or children (15%), followed by football teams (11%), and pets (8%). The most common password was ‘admin.’ One interviewee said, ‘I work in a financial call center, our password changes daily, but I do not have a problem remembering it as it is written on the board so that every one can see it…. I think they rub it off before the cleaners arrive.”
Passwords are interesting, what people choose. I’ve had, on more than one occassion, cause to ‘guess’ at someone else’s password. I usually got it three tries out of five, depending on how well I knew them.
A few weeks ago, I got a call from my son asking me for the admin password on the home computer. Now, I haven’t touched that computer in almost six months and I couldn’t remember the password that was on it when I moved out. But I could remember the two previous passwords. Fortunately, I know myself fairly well. It took me ten seconds to find the logical progression from passwords one to two to (finally) three.
End result: Sam got in and I spent three and a half minutes wondering about the strange way our memories work.
I’ve just recently changed all of my passwords, by the way. To get even close to my primary one — the one that lets you get into my laptop and e-mail and Paypal and this site’s server and Blogger — you’d have to know what was the most important thing to me when I was in sixth grade . . . and you’d have to be able to read my mind.
PIN numbers are something else entirely, PIN number are hard to remember. I finally devised a system recently in which I establish a mnemonic device based on [message truncated]…