Article by George Norman

On 04 Jan 2010

As Principal Engineer with MacAfee, Adam Wosotowsky, explained a while back, most users’ password habits fall in one of 3 categories:

• They select one password and use it for all their online accounts.
• They select one password that they use for their more important needs (like online banking) and a second password that they use for their other online accounts.
• They select a different password for each online account, but write those passwords down on a piece of paper or in a black book – which they keep near the computer, where anyone can see it.

Avira, company that specializes in providing antivirus, firewall, antispam and recovery solutions against malware infection, conducted a study on free-av.com that focused on how internet users handle their passwords. A total of 5,281 people took part in the study – 25% of them (that’s 1326 users) revealed that they use the same password for all their online needs. On the upside, the study also revealed that 33% of respondents use a different password for each online account. These users also treat their passwords with great care, making sure they remain confidential.

There is a simple reason why you should not use the same password over and over again. If that password is compromised then all your online accounts could be accessed by someone with malicious intent. If you fall into this category, take the time to change the passwords of your various online accounts. Follow Avira’s recommendations when doing so.


“A secure password should contain more than eight characters and should be a random sequence of uppercase and lowercase letters, special characters and digits,” advises Travis Witteveen, Head of Sales & Marketing at Avira GmbH. “There are useful tricks for memorizing these usually hard to remember passwords: thus for example, the sentence ‘My 2 kids go to school at 8 in the morning and I see them again in the evening at 6’ gives you the secure password ‘M2kgtsa8itmaIstaitea6’. Users should generate a separate secure password for every service or account they use if they are to avoid putting several accounts at risk should they ever lose a password.”



Tags: Avira, Password

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