Microsoft: You NEED bad passwords and should re-use them a lot

Microsoft: You NEED bad passwords and should re-use them a lot Dirty QWERTY a perfect P@ssword1 for garbage websites By Darren Pauli, 16 Jul 2014
 
Microsoft has rammed a research rod into the security spokes of the internet by advocating for password reuse in a paper that thoroughly derails the credentials best practise wagon. Password reuse has become a pariah in internet security circles in recent years following a barrage of breaches that prompted pleas from hacked businesses and media outlets to stop repeating access codes across web sites. The recommendations appeared logical; hackers with email addresses and passwords in hand could test those credentials against other websites to gain easy illegal access. Now Redmond researchers Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley, together with Paul C. van Oorschot of Carleton University, Canada, have shot holes through the security dogma in a paper Password portfolios and the Finite-Effort User: Sustainably Managing Large Numbers of Accounts (PDF). The trio argue that password reuse on low risk websites is necessary in order for users to be able to remember unique and high entropy codes chosen for important sites. Users should therefore slap the same simple passwords across free websites that don't hold important information and save the tough and unique ones for banking websites and other repositories of high-value information.
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