A report by Beyond Identity, a cybersecurity company focusing on login credentials like email accounts and passwords, has shown that people have little to no patience when it comes to resetting or thinking of new passwords. This is a problem for a multitude of reasons – businesses are losing out on sales after people give up their carts once their logins don’t work, their email marketing lists are getting clogged up with multiple email accounts belonging to the same people, and the whole process is becoming overall less efficient. So people are looking for a solution to this problem.
One in four online shoppers were willing to abandon a cart of $100+ if they had to reset their password to check out, with $162 being the typical threshold for forcing people to reset their password.Online banking login credentials were the most forgotten.Nearly half of respondents reported having to reset their bill-paying account password at least once a year due to login issues.Baby boomers were most likely to use old passwords when resetting account credentials.
There were other findings in the report, but they all lead to a similar conclusion – passwords can be finicky and frustrating, and keeping them in your mind for an extended period of time can be annoying. It doesn’t help that multiple websites will require different elements in passwords. For example, if your password is “hunter2” for a bunch of websites, but a new website requires the inclusion of a punctuation point, you might make it “hunter2!”. Then, months later, when signing in again, you’ll probably forget that additional inclusion, leading you to create a new account all together. – Jing Gu, senior product marketing manager at Beyond Identity Of course, this comes with its own problems. While it’s far easier for people to log into their accounts, it’s also far less secure. Considering even the most trivial online accounts (for things like pizza delivery or streaming shows online) can include things like credit card information, people would need to be very cautious about using this method. A lot of cyber security professionals are concerned about this method. Upon reading the report above, companies may begin licking their chops and thinking about how removing passwords can lead to them optimizing sales and limiting the amount of abandoned shopping carts, but if something does go wrong, it will likely be the customer who pays for it. – John Bambenek, Principal Threat Hunter at Netenrich So while we make do with written passwords, there is a way to make sure they’re as secure as they can be. Password managers are software platforms that allow you to generate and store complex and secure passwords that will ensure that everything is safe and sound. One of the main reasons people may feel averse to changing old passwords is due to the fact that memorising dozens of passwords for multiple websites is not going to be a fun time, so being able to have a different password for each site, stored in a secure network, means you won’t have to memorize them.
