Mnemonic Passwords Practices in Corporate Sites in Nigerian

Current technological drive towards paperless mode of operations, which provides faster delivery of corporate and banking services to a wider range of customers, has resulted in the problem of identity theft which is becoming a growing problem in Nigeria. There is the risk of unauthorized access, fraud and inappropriate disclosure of sensitive data. Human resources and malicious applications steal user identity, potentially resulting in a direct loss of highly sensitive information and hard currency to affected victims. To protect sensitive information, commercial and corporate sites extensively employ the use of textual passwords, which when used over an encrypted connection is vulnerable to attacks. To counter some of these attacks, many corporate sites instruct users to make use of mnemonic passwords without carefully considering the implications. This paper describes an empirical investigation performed to determine the factors influencing users mnemonic passwords practices, to analyze the strength of regular passwords and to evaluate the effectiveness of mnemonic passwords. Findings revealed that users’ context, which allows the deployment of mnemonic strategies for password memorization, is prosaic in nature and susceptible to human attackers and automated tools. Commercial and corporate sites will need these findings in order to adopt effective authentication strategies for logging customers into their sites.