One thing is constant in just about every business: We all use passwords.
It typically goes that the more passwords we have, the worse our password hygiene becomes. We tend to reuse passwords across accounts, rarely reset our passwords, and use simple, easy-to-hack passwords.
If you’re guilty of some of these password habits, you’re not alone. We’ve gathered a few of the top password statistics to help you understand habits that put your passwords at risk and how to improve your password security today.
Poor Password Management Statistics
- 36% of people engage in bad password habits because they believe their accounts are not valuable enough for hackers. (LastPass)
- 80% of data breaches are linked to passwords. (Verizon)
- 62.9% of online users change their passwords only when prompted. (GoodFirms)
- Even though 92% of people know that using a variation of the same password is a risk, 65% always or mostly use the same password or a variation. (LastPass)
- 62% of employees say they store login credentials in a notebook or journal, leaving them accessible to prying eyes. (Keeper Security)
- 64% of respondents said they use at least eight characters when creating a password. (Security.org)
- 37% of respondents have used their employer’s name in a work-related password. (Keeper Security)
- 79% of respondents created their passwords by mixing and matching words and numbers. (Security.org)
- 30% of respondents (IT experts, employees, and heads of organizations) said they have experienced a security breach due to weak passwords. (GoodFirms)
- 15% of people use their first name in their password. (Security.org)
- 18% of respondents said they had to reset their work passwords an average of five or more times in 2020. (Dashlane)
- Employees reuse a password an average of 13 times. (LastPass)
- Forgetting a password caused 78% of respondents to reset a password within the last 90 days when surveyed in 2019. (HYPR)
Password Security Statistics
- Using multi-factor authentication makes your account 99.9% less likely to be compromised. (Microsoft)
- Two-factor authentication has become more popular over the past two years, with 79% of respondents saying they used it in 2021 compared to 53% in 2019. (Duo Labs)
- SMS text messaging (85%) is the most common second factor that users choose when logging into 2FA accounts. (Duo Labs)
- In 2021, 93% of respondents said that banking and financial information was the most important to secure. (Duo Labs)
- 65% said they trust fingerprint or facial recognition more than traditional text passwords. (LastPass)
- 27% of people used password generators in 2021, compared to 15% in 2020. (Security.org)
- 67% of companies have a password policy for employees, but only 34% say they strictly enforce it. (Yubico and Ponemon Institute)
- A 12-character password takes 62 trillion times longer to crack than a six-character password. (Scientific American)
- Bad bots, performing credential scraping and other malicious actions, account for 24% of all internet traffic. (Dark Reading)
Putting password security top of mind can not only keep hackers from accessing valuable information, but it can help you stay in compliance with some of the top industry standards and regulations. Password management is a component of HIPAA and can help you avoid costly HIPAA violations.
For even more tips on how to improve your password management, our friends at Secureframe have created this infographic that outlines how to create an unhackable password and offers frameworks for better password creation.
Please include attribution to secureframe.com with this graphic.