Consumers Want Password Alternatives

Consumer confidence in online passwords wanes and their password hygiene remains as sketchy as ever, study finds.

Consumers would be very much behind the elimination of passwords from the online environment if retailers, banks and other services could get it together to institute an alternative, according to a new survey out this week.
The study showed that, as things stand, most consumers are not confident in online brands or the efforts theyve made so far to supplement password security. And, like many password surveys before it, this one shows once again that part of that mistrust stems from consumers admitted inability to effectively manage password hygiene for their own accounts.
“Passwords are inherently insecure as a method of authentication, and their eﬃcacy relies on end users, developers, system administrators, and the applications themselves, all of which are vulnerable to a wide variety of attack vectors currently being exploited by cyberattacks around the world, says Geoff Sanders, CEO of LaunchKey, which conducted the survey among 589 respondents.
The report confirms similar numbers from past surveys. For example, 68 percent of respondents reuse passwords across multiple accounts and 77 percent often forget passwords and have to write them down. This comes largely from the volume of login details they must remember. Nearly half of respondents have to manage more than 10 passwords at a time.
In spite of many major brands working on efforts to institute two-factor authentication, nearly two-thirds of consumers are still unfamiliar with these additional authentication methods and only about 20 percent believe they are easy to use, according to the survey.
Another survey out this week by Ponemon Institute shows that growing awareness of two-factor methods have started to up the ante on consumer perception of password security online environments. Looking at what drives consumer confidence in online brands, the study showed that 31 percent of consumers dont trust websites that only rely on passwords to identify and authenticate them.
Tellingly in the LaunchKey survey, 52 percent of survey respondents said they had little to no confidence in online retailers and 76 percent feel their data would be more secure with an alternative form of verification. Just over half of them support the idea of getting rid of passwords altogether. Approximately 59 percent of respondents say theyd prefer using fingerprint scans over passwords.
The future of authentication is free from traditional passwords,” Sanders said. “We must remove the vulnerability and liability that passwords have created while implementing more secure authentication methods that account for an evolving and diversiﬁed landscape of use cases, end users and threats.”

Last News
▸ DHS-funded SWAMP scans code for bugs. ◂ Discovered: 23/12/2024 Category: security	▸ Debunking Machine Learning in Security. ◂ Discovered: 23/12/2024 Category: security	▸ Researchers create BlackForest to gather, link threat data. ◂ Discovered: 23/12/2024 Category: security

**Cyber Security Categories**
Google Dorks Database	Exploits Vulnerability	Exploit Shellcodes

CVE List

Tools/Apps

News/Aarticles

Phishing Database

Deepfake Detection

Trends/Statistics & Live Infos

Tags:
Consumers Want Password Alternatives