Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering cloud computing and emerging tech industries
Password security in the United States - statistics & facts
Although passwords, in the sense of code-phrasing, have existed for centuries, going all the way back to the Mesopotamian civilization, it is in the United States that passwords were first introduced in the computing environment in the early 1960s by Fernando Corbato, while working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This led to the idea of encrypting passwords, developed in the 70s by another American, Robert Morris. His method, named hashing, was based on translating passwords into numbers using one-way encryption. Nowadays, passwords are ubiquitous, constituting the most used security method by companies worldwide in 2023.
