Grappling with password fatigue

• People have to remember almost 20 passwords for logging in different social media and bank accounts
• Remembering these passwords leads to mental and physical tiredness also called as password fatigue

What is the count of your passwords? On an average, people set up more than 20 different passwords for their daily chores like messaging on FaceBook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Gmail, Banking, Notes, Pay TM, Phone Pay, Google Pay, Phone Locks and more. Experts say that having 20 or more passwords for a single person leads to ‘password fatigue.’ It is a feeling experienced by many who are required to remember an excessive number of passwords, as part of their daily routine.

Sandeep Mudalkar, an ethical hacker, said that it’s not easy for humans to remember more than 20 passwords that are filled with uppercase, lowercase, special characters and numbers.

Count your passwords
Social networking sites, Gmail accounts, bank accounts, phone locks, online payments and more are the reasons for people to maintain galore of passwords. Most of the times, people get confused and use wrong passwords for accounts. Setting up a unique password for every platform has become a necessity due to the fear of cyber attacks and loss of information. But at the same time, it is leading to password fatigue and phobia in the process of remembering more keywords.

Sandeep said, “Passwords are like a combination of numbers, characters and even symbols as well. Overall, there are 26 characters, lowercase, uppercase and ten digits. So, when a user is including all these characters and numbers with upper and lower cases, there are chances based on website design that it would show whether the password is weak, strong or good. Three types of concepts will be covered in password cracking: digital attack, salting method and brute force attack.”

The digital attack, salting and brute force can be cracked through word list where a hacker gets it from dark websites. Word list is the one when the server data breach happens, the hacker will steal all the passwords of the user and they will create a word list that will be in the format of a text file. (.text).

Same passwords
Most of us have a habit of creating new passwords by changing only one digit or character to the older ones. People save their passwords in their browsers thinking that it is easy and that there is no need to remember, but it is very dangerous. Mudalkar added, “The hackers steal all the cookies of your browser and they send you a link that the user clicks blindly giving away all the information. With that cookies, he doesn’t require username or password. He can directly log-in using cookies. So, the user needs to clear cookies on a regular basis.”

What is password fatigue?
According to Srikanth, a clinical psychologist, password fatigue is generally caused when one tries to remember lengthy passwords. It is basically a kind of sub-clinical syndrome. People may have anticipatory anxiety when they change their passwords.

People are a little insecure about their privacy policies. They keep on checking their emails and sometimes they think it’s vulnerable. So, they keep changing passwords. This pre-occupation and insecurity also leads to the problem of password fatigue. Here they can do a data rerun. It is advisable to have a traditional way of entering things like note in a personal diary or share them with a family member. One can shuffle the numbers and characters of the password to help them remember new passwords from the old one.