"The Country Where You Live Impacts Password Choices"

GoSecure researchers have found that a person's country of residence influences the strength of their password selection. They discovered four primary macro-social factors that strongly correlate with positive password performance, which is measured by the time it takes to crack the credential. These factors include the level of human rights in-country and its degree of a free society, the population's literacy level, the country's placement in the Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI), and the level of data breach exposure and victimization. According to the researchers, countries have an impact on the level of protection provided to their users. The country of origin and/or residence of a user has an unavoidable impact on their social identity. It implies that social identity, which can be influenced at multiple levels, may have an impact on password selection. The researchers began by calculating the average time required to crack the 200 most common passwords by country, as determined by NordPass. According to the most recent data set, the average time to crack passwords worldwide is approximately 9.6 hours, with a range of 0 hours to more than ten years. Nonetheless, most passwords (61 percent) in the list can be cracked in less than a minute, according to the findings, which are consistent with other research. GoSecure then cross-referenced this data set with 29 different social variables, eventually discovering that four of them were strongly correlated indicators of password strength. This article continues to discuss the social factors found to impact password selection.

Dark Reading reports "The Country Where You Live Impacts Password Choices"