Jerquan Brabble
CYSE 201S
10/1/2022
The article that I reviewed was from the “Journal of Cybersecurity” titled “Prioritizing security over usability: Strategies for how people choose passwords”
A basic overview of this journal is that it focuses on a study done to learn about the characteristics as well as the consistencies between password creation and usage in order to discover patterns.
- Passwords are an important part of of the technological work that we do today. In an environment where so much information and data is being kept and managed, its important to have secure passwords to protect this data. In an ever-growing society where scammers and malicious users become smarter and craftier it is important that users are aware of how secure their passwords are. This relates to social science because phishing is such a developing part in our society that can negatively impact our data and security. We need to make sure people are informed about proper password usage and creation in order to best prevent any malicious user from brute forcing or “guessing” the user’s password.
- This study basically stood to answer the question of correlation between password creations. Basically they wanted to find out what the “common strategies” are when creating passwords in various situations.
- They gathered students from a US university with emphasis on keeping out any that were in a technological field. Basically what they did was ask the students to install a software that would track all of their passwords for 6 weeks and at the end of the study they would be compensated at a rate of 10$ per week.
- 134 students conducted in the study voluntarily, all students were between the ages of 18 and 29. They had a 53 to 47 percentage of female to male participants and a 77 to 33 percentage of white to other races. The program that was installed on to every applicants computer then analyzed the data sorting them through various factors such as: minimum password length, categorized websites, as well as personal attachment to websites.
- This topic is very relatable to our content in the fact that we practice strong password usage everyday.
- What is interesting about this specific study is that it took data from majorly college students with varying backgrounds and ethnicities. It was unique in the fact that it took data from several different key factors like personal attachment.
- Overall, I definitely think that this study helped us to see a lot of important things. We now know that there is correlation between what a person’s password is and what personal attachments they have. This isn’t really a positive thing since it opens up avenues for malicious users to exploit vulnerable users but it’s great information to have nonetheless.
Wash, R. (n.d.). Prioritizing security over usability: Strategies for how people choose passwords. Academic.oup.com. Retrieved October 7, 2022, from https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyab012/6291418