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The psychology of passwords starts right here: trying to understand people before systems.
Welcome to “The Mind Behind Passwords,” the column that looks at cybersecurity.
From a different perspective: that of people. In the digital world, we count everything: attacks, patches, CVEs, indicators. Yet the most crucial element continues to elude metrics: human behavior.
Passwords prove it every day. They aren’t created in a lab, but in our heads: through memories, habits, shortcuts, anxieties, good intentions, and that hint of the belief that we’re “unpredictable” while we’re actually doing the exact opposite.
Inside a password lies hidden routine, affection, nostalgia, moments of haste, false securities, and small daily self-deceptions. They don’t describe systems: they describe us. This column was created to explore just that. Each episode explores a real gesture:
There’s no need for moralizing or pointless technicalities. The goal is to understand why we do what we do and how these automatic responses become vulnerabilities without us realizing it. And, above all, to understand how we can address them: not with magic recipes, but with more conscious choices, less instinctive and closer to how we truly function.
Because security isn’t just a question of tools: it’s above all a question of awareness.
Passwords speak about us.
It’s time to listen to them.
Hollywood has sold us an irresistible narrative: the solitary, brilliant, sleepless hacker,
typing impossible commands while green lights scroll across impenetrable screens.
A being half-magician, half-mathematician, capable of breaking into any system thanks to sudden strokes of genius.
An image so powerful that it even ended up distorting the words:
Today we call “hacker” what, in reality, has another name.
The authentic hacker builds, studies, and improves; the one who truly violates systems is the attacker, the cracker.
But the myth reversed the roles, giving the criminal the glory of the creative.
The truth, however, is much less cinematic and much more effective.
You don’t always have to be a genius to hack a system.
You need to know the mathematics of human habits.
Modern attackers aren’t creativity freaks. They’re engineers of the obvious: habits, repetitive patterns, predictable passwords.
And the obvious, when it becomes a statistic, is devastating.
There is a specific moment – the one when “Create a new password” appears –
in which the modern human being abandons all his digital dignity
and regresses to the primitive stage of:
“As long as I remember it.”
One second we’re focused.
A second later the brain sits down, yawns and activates power saving mode.
Neuroscience calls it cognitive load reduction.
We call it:
“Ugh… again?”
The problem is simple: our memory is not designed to remember chaos.
Remember “cat”.
He doesn’t remember fY9!rB2kQz.
Not because of stupidity: because of physiology.
A complex password has no history, no associations,
he has no reason to stay.
And so, in the moment of fatigue, the lazy brain takes over.
“Come on… put Marco1984.
Who do you expect to guess it anyway?”
Oh yeah? Try typing it into Have I Been Pwned.
And here is the parade of creative solutions:
It’s not digital ignorance.
It’s psychology applied to everyday survival.
Availability bias does the rest:
The brain draws from the first open drawer. Recent memories, affections, dates, places, emotions.
We’re not creating a password: we’re choosing a convenient memory.
It’s human.
Natural, almost inevitable.
And the result is often disastrous.
No policy can change this data:
A complex password is as unnatural as memorizing the serial number of your refrigerator.
And in fact, we don’t memorize it. We do what any struggling brain does: we look for shortcuts.
We are biological beings with thirty digital keys to manage.
It is natural that the mind collapses on the first shortcut it finds.
Behind the worst passwords there is always an innocent desire:
simplify your life.
“Who do you want to come to me?”
“I have nothing interesting.”
“It’s only temporary…”
Our brain convinces us that we are too small to be a target.
The problem is that, in the digital world, we are all equally big targets.
And before you think these are exaggerations, here are some real numbers (sometimes more merciless than jokes):
This is where the irony ends and the statistics become merciless: what is predictable, for an attacker, is exploitable.
And this is just the beginning:
The mind behind passwords still has a lot to tell.
Now let’s analyze the first problem: where security ends, stationery begins. And the real problems.
There is an ecosystem that no SOC monitors, no SIEM records, and no threat actor should actually breach:
the post-it ecosystem.
A sacred, mystical, underground place, where the average user performs his most intimate rituals.
You find it everywhere: on the monitor, under the keyboard, stuck to the modem like a digital votive offering.
The most frequent phrase?
“I can’t remember the password anymore.”
At that point the post-it intervenes as a sort of analogical carer:
It keeps your secret, holds your memory, and reminds you that security is beautiful until you have to make it.
Passwords on Post-it notes aren’t born out of stupidity. They’re born out of existential exhaustion.
After yet another failed attempt and the usual message
“The new password cannot be the same as the last 12”,
the user performs the final gesture:
“Enough. I’ll write it down.”
It’s a liberating moment. Almost cathartic.
For some, the first real act of cyber disobedience.
The paradox is merciless:
A post-it is a secret that everyone can read except the one who is supposed to keep it.
For the user, it becomes invisible, part of the digital office furniture. Only two categories notice it:
In the middle, the desert.
When trying to blend in, the user gives his best:
Result: no one understands the password. Not even him.
It’s the first human ransomware: the data is there, but the user no longer knows how to decrypt it.
Opening an office drawer means starting an archaeological dig:
Each slip of paper is a relic of the daily battle with digital memory.
And this is where a detail emerges that cybersecurity ignores:
the almost ancestral respect for paper.
We treat it as a reliable, tangible, trustworthy object. Digital can fail you without warning.
Memory can vanish at the wrong moment. But the note doesn’t: it remains there, physical, familiar, understandable.
Users don’t write their passwords on post-it notes because they are careless,
but because they have an instinctive trust in the material.
The card does not require updates, does not expire, and does not change policies.
It is the last bastion of analog in a world that asks us
to remember more and more and understand less and less.
The post-it survives because it gives security.
Tangible, not theoretical.
Unless it blows away. Or sticks to your sweater. Or ends up in the trash.
But this is his tragic poetry.
As long as we invent passwords, we will also invent ways to misremember them.
And Post-its will remain our small, stubborn analog resistance in the world of digital threats.
A vulnerability? Of course.
A problem? Absolutely.
But also one of the greatest anthropological truths of cybersecurity.
Because, ultimately, passwords tell us one simple thing:
We don’t change our behavior until we understand the source of the behavior itself.
In the next episode we will go even deeper, where psychology becomes design:
The IKEA Effect – the illusion that makes us stick to the worst passwords just because “we built them ourselves.”
And immediately after, the tragedy of the Change Password – the corporate ritual that risks producing more accidents than safety.
Continues…
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