It most definitely does not fall within my area of expertise, but based on what I have read, the average person can only take so much Chinese water torture or pokes from a cattle prod before they break.
At that breaking point they will do or say anything just to make the pain stop. Based on my observations a lot of people are nearing that breaking point when dealing with passwords.
I recently had a very difficult day starting off with a client who had lost a cell phone years ago and now the person who found it was using the information on that phone to try to steal her identity. Next up was someone else who could not access her email because she had lost the password. Following that it was another client who had forgotten the logon password for his laptop, and then finally it was a lady who was flummoxed by being forced by her bank to create a new password that met requirements for upper case, lower case, number, symbol, length, complexity, and a password not used previously.
This lady had obviously neared the breaking point when she summoned me to help her reset all of her passwords. She said she wanted to change all of her passwords including email, social media, and banking to “1234” so she could remember. I tried to explain how insecure that would make her finances when she interrupted me in a loud voice, almost a scream: “I DON’T CARE!!!”
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