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Passwords in Use Expected to Grow to 100 Billion by 2020, Study Says

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By Marcos Colon

A new report from Cybersecurity Ventures and security firm Thycotic projects that the number of passwords in use will grow from 75 billion to 100 billion in 2020. Additionally, given the proliferation of the Internet of Things, the passwords associated with those devices is expected to grow from 15 billion in 2015 to roughly 200 billion by 2020.

Although the death of the password has been a hot topic that frequently crops up among security practitioners and vendors alike, the use of passwords doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.  Employees at organizations are known not to use complex passwords, opting for terms and keystroke combinations that are easily memorable.

With attackers only needing to guess the password of one privileged account to wreak havoc on a network, this creates a massive problem for security managers.

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