Those Daily Mail and Social Media Guru’s have been out in force today. In the annual “Top Ten Guff About Password Security Things”, here’s the Daily Mail link to “Time to change YOUR password?” article.

We even get a lovely graphic telling up the top ten (from 2013)….

I’m sure we’ve all got out own horror story to share of some relative that picked a fairly obvious password because it’s easy to remember. Fair enough, it’s not easy and password keeper programs aren’t always the easiest to wrap your head around.

What’s often ignored from these articles though is the lack of context I would wager some of these passwords are created. Could be a test account (developers love making test accounts) and in all reality are you really going to rack your brains thinking of a strong password for an app that tracks dog poop from your smart phone? Probably not.

William Poundstone made a very good point in his book, “How To Predict the Unpredictable“.

“Most users care more about convenience and less about security than the experts do. I’m not so sure the crowd is wrong.”

Passwords are trade offs for the user. If the user really wants to protect the information they are storing (email, banking and social media for example) then they will pick a much harder password to crack (hopefully). Otherwise they will more than likely go for something that’s easier to remember. Dog Poop app, well there’s every chance they’d go for the name of the dog.