Tricky things, passwords. They are our most common way of safeguarding digitally stored information over shared media but they are fraught with contradictions. Most obviously, the safer they look - in terms of length and mix of characters - the harder they often are to remember, making them dangerous when end users write them down. Meanwhile employers are increasingly being told passwords - meant to make things safer - are not just frequently insecure but costly to support and legally contentious.

Consider help desk costs. There is a general consensus that resetting forgotten passwords costs companies around £10-30 a go and can account for between 30 and 60 per cent of helpdesk calls.

"And this will increase with stronger password rules," says Rudolph Huber, VP identity management at ASG.

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