Dutch people save password in email or on paper

Dutch people save password in email or on paper

22-11-2017 11:54:12

In several days, it will be Change Your Password Day! However, it seems that a lot of people are very irresponsible with their passwords. More than half of the Dutch people stores their passwords in an unsafe manner. No less than 38 percent writes their passwords down on paper and 18 percent emails them to themselves in order not to forget them. Little tools are being used to generate or safe passwords. Only 14 percent of the people uses a password generator and 15 percent does not even know what that is! 17 percent of the people uses a password manager, but 18 percent has never heard of such a thing before. The percentages are a little higher for the younger part of the population: 21 and 25 percent respectively. These are results from research performed by BIT, a specialist in colocation, internet connections, managed hosting and outsourcing, among 1.012 Dutch people with office jobs. The data is bundled in the report ‘Internet Eigenwijs 2017’.

Changing passwords

Even though the majority (64%) thinks that they change their passwords regularly, it seems that only half changes their passwords once every 3 months, 19 percent once a year and 9 percent never changes their passwords. Also, 46 percent uses variations of the same password for all online accounts. In addition, more than half of the Dutch people (53%) indicates to use the same password for more than 3 logins. For younger people (ages 18-34), this percentage is even higher at 64%!

Wido Potters, Manager Support & Sales at BIT:  “A password policy within an organisation must be workable to prevent people from neglecting the rules. When employees need to change their passwords every month, use at least 25 characters and still be unique, there is a good chance that you will find post-its everywhere. If measures remain manageable, the risk of people using corporate passwords for private accounts (or the other way around) will be significantly smaller. In addition, we cannot stress enough that everyone needs to use password managers and generators. Unique passwords are, understandably, not easy to remember for every login, especially when there are a bunch of conditions attached. In order to increase the safety in the workplace, it is advisable to inform employees in a proactive manner and advise them on the available password tools.”

Want to know more on the research results? Download the report ‘Internet Eigenwijs 2017’ here: https://www.bit.nl/bit-onderzoeksrapport-2017