Communications of the ACM
Smarter People Don't Have Better Passwords, Study Finds
A study carried out at Asia Pacific College in the Philippines shows that students with better grades use bad passwords in the same proportion as students with bad grades.
The study focused on a new rule added to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guideline for choosing secure passwords—added in its 2017 edition.
The researchers took their students' email addresses associated with school accounts and checked to see if the students' passwords had been leaked in previous breaches, then correlated the results with their GPA. Researchers checked students' passwords against a massive list of over 320 million passwords exposed in previous breaches and collected by Australian security researcher Troy Hunt, maintainer of the Have I Been Pwned service.
The results showed similar percentages of students across the GPA spectrum that were using previously exposed passwords—considered weak passwords and a big no-no in NIST's eyes.
From BleepingComputer
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