Women are more likely to spill the beans over chocolate.
Ping! An email arrives in Backchat’s inbox with the curious title ‘Women four times more likely to give away passwords than men for chocolate’. Pardon?
A survey by Infosecurity Europe found that 45% of women compared to 10% of men were prepared to give away their password to strangers masquerading as market researchers, with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for filling in the survey.
The researchers also asked the office workers for their dates of birth to validate that they had carried out the survey: here the workers were very naïve with 61% revealing their date of birth.
The survey was actually part of a social engineering exercise to raise awareness about information security.
However, this year’s survey results were significantly better than previous years. “In 2007 64% of people were prepared to give away their passwords for a chocolate bar, this year it had dropped to just 21%. So at last the message is getting through to be more infosecurity savvy,” says Infosecurity Europe.
