The New York Times > Week in Review > Your Password, Please: Pssst, Computer Users . . . Want Some Candy?

The New York Times > Week in Review > Your Password, Please: Pssst, Computer Users . . . Want Some Candy?: "A man posted outside a London subway station at rush hour offered a chocolate bar to random passers-by if they would reveal the password they used to log on to the Internet. Amazingly, more than 7 out of 10 took the offer.
The survey was something of a publicity stunt staged by the organizers of Infosecurity Europe 2004, an information-technology conference held in London last week. It was hardly scientific; only 172 people were polled, and it was not verified that people were offering up an actual password. But among computer experts, even this informal exercise pointed out a persistent truism: that for the millions of dollars corporations have spent on erecting firewalls and installing expensive intruder-detection systems on their networks, the weakest link in any system remains the ordinary, well-meaning but hopelessly gullible user. "