Too many pointless passwords

There are just so many places that need passwords that it is completely unrealistic to expect people to remember a different one for every place. As YAAC said above, most people I know keep one password for serious stuff and another for waste of space passwords that they don't care about.

Another problem is that best practise really doesn't work in most environments.

We have access to a government database which every member of the company needs to get into - from directors to pool secretaries, and there's supposed to be full traceability. Its password policy requires each user not only to have mixed alphanumeric 12 digit passwords with no logical sequences and so on, but requires a change every month. Surprise surprise, after the first couple of months no one could remember the passwords they had last come up with, so we spent hours every week on the phone to the govt dept concerned resetting accounts. In the end, we just decided it wasn't worth the bother and told everyone to write the blasted things down. Self defeating password policy. You could blame us for not having superhuman powers of recalling random character strings, but at the end of the day, humans are not machines - and people who come up with password policies need to be realistic.

But they don't

>If users (as they often do) use the same login credentials for social networking sites and more sensitive accounts

That's the whole point, people use junk passwords for all those sites that insist on a password for no good reason - and keep the secure ones separate for important uses, like er' reg comments.

Old vs New problem

"Persuading users to use stronger passwords is an age-old problem that dates back to the dawn of the PC era."

It's not an old problem, it's a new problem.

In the old days, you had about 3 passwords; you had to convince the user to make them strong. Once they were strong, you could use them for a long time because they were secure. Because you didn't change them, you could remember them.

Now, we all have a dozen or so passwords. If we make them strong, they're hard to remember. The harder they are to remember, the more likely we are to reuse them. Because some people use weak passwords, corporate policies add a layer of security by forcing us to change them every few months.

I can remember every password I had on the computers at uni, because I used them frequently for a long time. My password for the office PC expires so quickly that I've barely learnt it by the time I'm asked to change it. The cognitive load is high, and every time I sit back down and unlock my PC, I have to filter out "noise" from half-a-dozen old and "other system" passwords before I get to log in.

So my passwords are getting weaker all the time as it's the only way to remember them.

It is a new problem -- it just looks similar to an old one.