Cybersecurity experts from Kaspersky Lab and Mail.ru conducted a joint study to find out the attitude of Russians to creating and storing passwords, and their most dangerous online habits that help hackers. The survey was conducted in October 2024 among 1867 Russians aged 18 to 70 who use Mail.ru.
It turned out that almost every fourth respondent — 24% of respondents — is not sure about the reliability of the passwords they created for services important to them: reference and information services, messengers, social networks. At the same time, almost half of the respondents — 42% — come up with unrelated sets of symbols, letters, numbers and signs as passwords, and 13% of respondents resort to using password managers, which is considered a "good digital habit". For 4% of respondents, passwords are created by their relatives.
Also, almost half of the respondents — 49% — use no more than three passwords for all their accounts. And the majority — 61% — of respondents who have several passwords also noted that some combinations are similar or completely identical.
Cybersecurity experts note: it is dangerous to store your passwords on paper, in notes, screenshots on your phone, letters to yourself or others, in messages in messengers, electronic and cloud documents. That is, if attackers steal one of the passwords from such respondents, they will also gain access to the remaining accounts, profiles and mailboxes. The same will happen if the passwords are the same or identical.
Often, users take the easy way out: they come up with simple combinations, use the same credentials for different services. But the results of this approach can be very disastrous. Recently, the Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence team analyzed 193 million passwords found in the public domain on the darknet. It turned out that attackers can guess almost half of them in less than a minute. Therefore, it is more effective to use special solutions — password managers. They, in fact, reduce the burden on users to ensure their own cybersecurity: they help create unique passwords and store them securely.
Another way to easily configure protection, in addition to password managers, is two-factor authentication. However, 18% of survey participants noted that they do not configure it anywhere, 28% of respondents said that they install it where it is required in services. And only 18% of respondents use two-factor authentication for all accounts where possible.
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