Password sharing as a sign of trust?

[AMLinington]

Being Honest, I know a LOT of passwords for people in my family. I know bank PINs and online banking logins (mostly because the parents can't get to grips with these slippery intertubes and get me to do everything for them). I know passwords and PINs for the boyfriend and I could hazard an accurate guess at my sisters bank PIN (if its the same one it was 10 years ago).

 

Having said that I have a pretty good memory for number strings.

 

I tend to categorise sites and have 3 or 4 different passwords in the password group for that category. So, for example, lets say my 'category 1 password group' is for sites I don't fully trust or for 'low security' stuff like discussion forums where if someone hacks it and gets my password and email they won't get access to anything higher than other 'category 1' sites - so other discussion forums etc. Category 2 is for online shopping sites - mostly ones using paypal, also sites that I occasionally buy goods and services from. This password group is a higher complexity than cat 1. Cat 3 is for online banking, main email account, utilities etc. Cat 3 are changed often and are heavily complex passphrases or strings of numbers and letters.

 

I also have a 'work' category that has no affiliation with cats 1 -3.

[Arcath]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_strength.png

 

From XKCD

[AMLinington]

I love XKCD. It's so true though. Sad thing is, I'd find it easier to remember Tr0ub4dor&3 than I would horsebatterystaplecorrect - I'd get the words the wrong way around. I find it easier to remember a 36 digit long passphrase made up of initials birthdays etc in the order in which a family was born and where they lived by the very fact that I know the 'algorithm' I used to create it - ie. I might KNOW that I wrote a WEP key (back in the day when we used WEP before WPA etc) that was the initials followed by birthdays of everyone in our immediate family in reverse order preceded by our house number and followed by a shortened version of our road name. So even if I can't remember it exactly I can 'rewrite' it based on the rules. I think I overcomplicate things...

[CAM]

Not just MyMaths, how many kids or even adults share their password for an MMO account? In some cases companies made changes to how their software works to discourage password sharing. Example, Blizzard introduced Guild Banks to eliminate the need to share account details for a guild member's account to access a bank character.

 

Whilst users need to be educated not to share, maybe some sites or programs can look at their design and think "Why are people sharing passwords and how can we reduce it?"

 

As for myself, I can frequently be seen trying to brute force my own accounts remembering what password I used for a particular site. Luckily older and/or unimportant sites draw from a large pool of potential passwords. If one gets hacked, not all of them do. Critical stuff like work passwords, E-Mail and banking have a unique password.