The Effect of Educating Users on Passwords: a Preliminary Study.
Viktor Taneski, Boštjan Brumen, Marjan Heričko · 2014
Passwords are a basic authentication method for most information systems. Despite their widespread use, passwords still suffer from a number of problems. Users and their passwords are the Achille’s heel (the weakest link) of security, because they still tend to create passwords that are weak, easy to remember and contain words that a familiar to them. They also tend to trade security for memorability. Users ’ lack of security consciousness and their behaviour can be influenced by information security training. This paper presents the preliminary results of our research in progress. Our research explores the effect of password security training on strength of the passwords chosen by the users and their consciousness about security and the importance of creating strong and hard-to-guess passwords. We collected the data by means of an online questionnaire, performed among undergraduate students from the Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Maribor. Overall, the results show that, despite our lectures and recommendations, users still lack of security knowledge regarding password change and password write-down and need to be further educated in this direction.