Would you have enough names of pets, kids, lovers or favourite cars to create more than 30 passwords? That’s how many different open-sesames some of us have to use at work every week, says a survey.

The study, conducted to mark Information Security Awareness Week (it was last week . . . surely you noticed) found that more than one person in six now has three different office passwords. Add to that all the PINs, personal e-mail access codes and banking ciphers in our lives and our poor brains groan under the load.

Small wonder that nearly half of us don’t bother to change our passwords - considered a big boo-boo by security analysts. Worse, more than half of us use the same password for everything - work, bank, home, web and all.

We seem to be suffering from some kind of personal-security fatigue. The Infosecurity Europe survey found that, despite all the data protection propaganda, nearly half of all women stopped outside a London railway station happily told their passwords to strangers masquerading as market researchers in exchange for a chocolate bar.

Yet only 10 per cent of men were prepared to tell. Maybe that’s because chocolate doesn’t do it for them. And it would have been unethical for the researchers to have offered sex. Chocolate and sex often aren’t necessary though, says the study. Most of us say we would give our passwords to anyone who rings claiming to be from our company’s IT department.

Why are we so careless? Part of the problem is that passwords are such a drag to use that we forget how they can play a high-value role. Making them feel far more perilous might work better. Perhaps instead of passwords, we should have to type clues to our most terrible personal secrets, things that would cause deep embarrassment if revealed. At least it would make the lives of the guys in the IT departments less mundane.

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