Every once in a while I have to log into a website I haven't been to in, say, a year. I type in my username and password, hit enter, and the internet yells at me.
Wrong password. OK, I say, and type another variation of the password.
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I tell myself, "This time I'll use a an exclamation point instead of an 'I,'" sure that this could be the only other option.
Wrong again, so I go back to typing my original guess, thinking maybe I'd misspelled it the first time, but no, I'm wrong, and now my fingers are flying across the keyboard until the internet has yelled at me so many times that I have to create a new password and answer a bunch of questions to prove I'm not some imposter hacker trying to steal my own LinkedIn info.
Deep breath.
Point is, passwords are hard to remember, and a little bit of new data proves that I'm not the only one who thinks so.
According to a new survey of 1,000 respondents by Keeper Security, more than 80 percent of folks ages 18 and up reuse the same password across multiple accounts.
Image: Keeper security
"Our findings indicated that password reuse across different applications is frequent, average password strength for mobile applications and websites is low and that most users rarely change passwords," Keeper wrote in a summary of its survey data.
They also found that 29 percent of respondents share passwords with two or more people, and that 60 percent of people had to reset a password in the past 60 days.
The folks at Keeper, of course, would like you to download its password-managing app, so they've got an incentive for making you feel insecure about your password. But, to be honest, this report rings pretty true.
