Vision: What Johnny learns about Password Security from Videos posted on YouTube
Mathieu Christmann, Peter B. Mayer, Melanie Volkamer · 2021
The text password is the most pervasive authentication scheme and is unlikely to disappear soon. Companies employ password awareness and training campaigns to reduce the risk of insecure password management endangering these companies. While larger companies may buy measures for those campaigns externally or develop their own ones, small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) are likely to turn to freely available material – most likely videos – as they don’t have budget and own experience to handle it like larger companies. We analysed such freely available videos and show their shortcomings. To that end, we aggregated requirements from the existing literature and applied these to a body of 32 freely available YouTube videos using search terms informed by Google Trends. The contributions of this work are two-fold. Firstly, the findings of our analysis show that the best video covers only about half of the requirements, which raises serious concerns regarding the quality of available videos and their suitability for usage in awareness campaigns by SMEs. Secondly, our list of aggregated requirements can inform the design of future videos, which is planned as a follow-up to this work to remedy the concerns uncovered in our analysis.