The survey was conducted by the organizers of Infosecurity Europe
2004, a security exhibition to be held in London next week. They
offered 172 commuters at Liverpool Street Station a bar of chocolate if
they would reveal their corporate password.

Surprisingly, 37 percent immediately agreed, while another 34
percent were persuaded to give up their secret access codes when the
interviewer commented that it was most likely to be the name of their
pet or their child.

Claire Sellick, event director for Infosecurity Europe 2004,
said the results prove that employers are not educating their users
about the importance of information security: „This comes down to poor
training and procedures. Employers should make sure that their
employees are aware of information security policies and that they are
kept up-to-date,” she said in a statement.

According to the survey, most participants were unhappy
remembering so many different passwords and would prefer to use either
biometric authentication – such as fingerprint recognition – or
smartcards. „Clearly, workers are fed up with having to remember
multiple passwords and would be happy to replace them with alternative
identification technology,” – said Sellick.

At the RSA Security conference in San Francisco last month,
Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates said traditional passwords are dying
out because they cannot be relied on to keep critical information
secure. During his keynote, Gates said: „There is no doubt that over
time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords. People use
the same password on different systems, they write them down and they
just don’t meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure.”