Data Monday: Login & Passwords

by January 30, 2012

Despite being nearly ubiquitous online, username and password login screens are wrought with usability and security issues. Here's a small sample of how bad things are.

  • The average person has between 7 and 25 accounts that they log into every day. (source)
  • People report authenticating about 15 times in a typical work day on average. (source)
  • 86% of U.S. companies use password authentication. (source)
  • 70% of people do not use a unique password for each Web site. (source)
  • Around 82% of people have forgotten a password used on a Web site. (source)
  • 4.28% of Yahoo users forgot their passwords over a three month period. (source)
  • Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities. (source)
  • 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. (source)
  • A survey of 34,000 MySpace passwords revealed that the most common were "password1", "abc123", "myspace1", and "password". (source)