Survey: 60 percent of users use the same password across more than one of their online accounts

How often do you change your password? Do you share your passwords with family members, and how confident are you that malicious attackers wouldn't be able to guess your password?

According to a newly published survey results, 60 percent of users use the same password across more than one of their online accounts.

More findings from the survey which sampled 1000 Australians:

• Over three quarters (77%) of Australians have more than three online passwords
• Nearly all (90%) of Australians are confident others wouldn’t be able to guess their online passwords
• Nearly two thirds (60%) of Australians use the same password across more than one of their online accounts
• Almost half (48%) of Australians only change their password when required to by a system
• Nearly half (42%) of Australians have shared their password with a friend, family member or work colleague
• Over a third (36%) remain logged into their online accounts

Nowadays, cybercriminals rarely brute force their way into a user's account, even though the CAPTCHA-solving process can be easily outsourced. Instead, they rely on data mining of malware-infected hosts for stolen credentials. The data is later on used for spreading of malicious code, or for active spamming purposes.

Just how important is to change your passwords regularly? Depends on the perspective. Whereas the more often you change a password, the higher the probability that a malicious attacker that's actively data mining botnets, will be left with outdated data, changing your password on a malware-infected host is pointless, as the malicious attacker would once again obtain access to your accounting data.

Go through related posts:

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• Weak passwords dominate statistics for Hotmail's phishing scheme leak
• Study: password resetting 'security questions' easily guessed

How do you deal with your passwords overload? Do you write theme down, or conveniently store them in digital format? How often do you change them, and do you use the same password across multiple web properties? Do believe that strong passwords in a  world dominated by malware infected hosts are worth it?

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