The price of a password
A recent survey of 576 office workers in Central London discovered that 45% of the women interviewed and 10% of the men were prepared to hand over passwords in exchange for bars of chocolate.
It is worrying that people still treat password security with such little regard although we shouldn't read too much into these results. The researchers admit that they did not try to verify the passwords were authentic so it could well be that the respondents gave false passwords simply to obtain the chocolate bar. We should also take heart that this year's figure of 21% overall is the best yet. Last year 64% of respondents were happy to give away a password for the promise of a bar of chocolate. This means that people are either getting more security aware, or more concerned about healthy eating, but either way it is a good trend.
Perhaps people are less aware about the growth in fraud, identity theft, and targeted marketing. At the end of the survey, participants were asked for personal information including their name, address, phone number and date of birth on the pretext that they were being entered into a prize draw for having participated. Over 60% were happy to hand over this information to the stranger with the clipboard.
16th May 2008