German and Korean language users tend to have the strongest passwords, while Indonesian language users tend to have the weakest passwrods according to a review of 70 million Yahoo users, Cambridge researcher Joseph Bonneau found.
Users who change passwords five or more times tend to have stronger passwords, the study found. At the same time, users who have their passwords resest because of a compromised account do not choose better passwords than average users.
Users who have recently logged in from multiple locations choose stronger passwords, the research also found.
Despite these relative differences, no group did well in selecting passwords. “We find surprisingly little variation in guessing difficulty; every identifiable group of users generated a comparably weak password distribution”, Bonneau wrote in an abstract to the study.
“Security motivations such as the registration of a payment card have no greater impact than demographic factors such as age and nationality”, he noted.
Even proactive efforts to nudge users toward better password choices with graphical feedback make little difference. "More surprisingly, even seemingly distant language communities choose the same weak passwords”, Bonneau observed.