Passwords annoy Internet users

By Chung Ah-young

People are becoming increasingly frustrated with online accounts and apps requiring them to enter complicated passwords.

Kim Si-hyun, 37, recently had to juggle multiple combinations of passwords to make a hotel reservation for a summer vacation. She attempted to log on to a tourism website more than five times but could not because she forgot her password. She had no choice but to change it again.

“Whenever I book a flight or a hotel, I have to change my password because I keep failing to get my password right. Forget and change, forget and change... It’s a vicious circle of horrible logins,” she said.

It’s really annoying for Kim to manage her passwords as she has more than 10 different identities on different websites.

“Different websites have frequently asked me to change my password by combining letters, numbers and special characters. Their requirements are all different! How can I remember all these things?” she complained.

With more of life becoming digitalized, more people find the need for passwords for unlocking mobile phones, logging into their computers and checking their email.

Nowadays website operators require users to set longer and more complicated passwords because the risk of personal data leakage is getting higher. Many websites require users to change their passwords every three or six months.

The nation’s major portal sites such as Naver and Daum require passwords consisting of at least six and eight characters respectively, which all have to include numbers, letters and special characters.

Too complicated to remember

According to a recent survey conducted by Centrify, a U.S.-based password management software provider, people have to remember at least 19 passwords on average to log into computers, email, online banking, social media, online shopping and corporate servers.

The survey showed that about a quarter of the respondents forget their passwords at least once per day and 5 percent forget them all the time. Also, one in three respondents said that they suffer from “password rage” and one in six scream or shout in the office.

Song Min-joo, 24, said that whenever she has to change her passwords she gets angry.

“Why should I have the burden to keep my information safe? Is there any other way to improve this?” she asked.

Shin Weon, professor in the Information Security Department at Tongmyong University, said that at the moment, it is inevitable to use complicated passwords combining uppercase and lowercase letters along with numbers and special characters.

“Passwords are equivalent to identifications in cyberspace. Using passwords is still the most common and popular way to strengthen security for personal information because it costs too much to use other means, such as iris or fingerprint scanners,” he said.

Shin said that passwords with a complicated combination are recommended in the United States because many people use easy-to-remember passwords such as “passwords” and “qwerty,” which are vulnerable to hacking.

“Various new hacking techniques have been developed, which can crack passwords easily. So we need to use complicated passwords that are safer,” he said.

The professor, however, said that website operators need to reduce burdens on users by adopting a secret code using patterns and fingerprint scanning, which are used in mobile phones.

Yahoo recently introduced a password-on-demand system, which lets users log into their accounts through a short password the company sends to their phones.

Microsoft is adopting biometric identification instead of passwords in Windows 10, which allows users to have a webcam examine their face, iris or fingerprint.

“In Korea, many software developers are working on this problem. So in the near future, such security programs will help easier log-in without concerns over security,” Shin said.