Two-thirds of British consumers use the same password for most of their online accounts

Password re-use message has yet to filter down to the masses, according to survey of British internet users

Two-thirds of British internet net users are still re-using their passwords across their most important online accounts.

Only one-fifth use a different password for each account they have, while more than two-fifths admitted that they found the sheer number of different passwords required for managing various online accounts "overwhelming". And nine per cent have never changed their email account password - email often being the ‘front door' to many other online accounts.

Just 28 per cent claimed to use different passwords for each online service they use.

That's according to a survey of more than 1,000 British consumers by GMX, the free online email service from United Internet, better known in the UK as 1&1.

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A total of 64 per cent of the respondents to the survey admitted admitted re-using the same password across multiple online accounts, and 21 per cent admitted that they used basic personal information, such as their favourite football team, as or part of their passwords.

Astonishingly, perhaps, only 30 per cent claimed to have more than 10 different accounts, while 40 per cent claimed to be able to remember all their passwords.

Twenty per cent of the respondents write down their passwords on a piece of paper, but eight per cent claimed that they use a password manager, while four per cent claim to use a single sign-on service provided by the likes of Facebook or Google. One per cent keep their passwords in a document saved on a cloud service like Box, Dropbox or OneDrive.

The vast majority of the respondents - 70 per cent - were unaware of some of the recent Collection #1=#5 data breaches, which revealed how people's login information is being shared online.

To find out whether your email account user name and password might have been compromised, check out the ‘Have I been pwned?' website of security specialist Troy Hunt.

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