World Password Month, a celebration of strong passwords

April 13th, 2023
World Password Month, Week 2: never write passwords down
He who writes, stays – as the saying goes. However, that doesn’t apply to password management. Even if ‘never write passwords down anywhere, but keep them secret and to yourself’ comes as no surprise, we did get some surprising results in our scans.
Awareways will celebrate World Password Day (May 4th) this year by publishing a weekly nugget of numerical wisdom related to passwords and organizational culture. Welcome to password month.
The Question
We asked 9.000 people if they do in fact write their passwords down. Again, we have divided them into small-, mid-size and large organizations according to the number of employees (<750, 751-2500 and >2.500, respectively).
Surprisingly, 50.1% of people in small companies did so, just about half of them.
For large companies, the results went up to 59.1% and in the case of mid-sized ones, it came in at a whopping 71.1%. Remarkable results in and of itself, but how can the outlier in mid-sized organizations be explained?
What’s the logic behind these numbers?

…
The Answer
In cybersecurity, different types of statistical research show similar results; small organizations outperforming larger ones. Perhaps in this case, employees of smaller entities feel personal responsibility, while people in larger organizations feel responsibility is incorporated in their more abundant management layers.
Larger organizations, however, invest more time in compliance, frameworks, and auditing. This may be why they score better than mid-sized organizations.
Needless to say, never write passwords down. Organizations should be aware of the risks of password re-use and leaks, educate the staff on how to avoid them, and adopt best practices. That includes providing password management tools like Keeper and 1Password.
More insights next week! Check out our first World Password Month blog (strong passwords).
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