Password habits of Sweden

Abstract: The password is the first line of defence in most modern web services, it is therefore critical to choose a strong password. Many previous studies have found patterns to improve in global users password creation but none have researched the patterns of Swedish users in particular. In this project, passwords of Swedish users were gathered from underground forums and analyzed to find if Swedish users create passwords differently from global users and if there are any weak patterns in their passwords. We found that Swedish users often use words or names found in a Swedish NLP corpus in their passwords as well as using lowercase letters more frequently than global users. We also found that several of the most popular Swedish websites use weak password policies which might contribute to Swedish users choosing weak passwords.