Who's to say the vast majority of these people didn't lie and give a fake password in order to get some free chocolate? I know I would...

Free chocolate bar for lying. Result!

Short of using the gained passwords to hack into the businessmen's corporate accounts, how did they verify that they were receiving genuine passwords? I would quite happily make something up in return for free chocolate. My password is "Kangaroo42", where's my Dairy Milk?

Free chocolate...

Well I'd sure give a password for that, one that I've just made up to get the chocolate though. No need to give your real password is there

... that the given password was real? For a bar of chocolate I'd make up a password.

Of course lots of us would lie to get our free chocolate, and walk away thinking how we've beaten the system. Meanwhile the researchers chalk up an alarming high statistic on how easy it is to get passwords, which they can then sell on to companies selling security software. And by the time they quote the stat, the details on how it was obtained are quietly dropped.

There are lies, damned lies and Market Research....

Then you can compare answers before and after and thus work out the proportion lying

where do we sign up

why am I never around when they're handing out free chocolate?

I demand to know what chocolate was used to obtain the password ! I won't give away a fake password if it's not at least 70% pure cocoa.

Anything less is not even worthy of my making something up.

As for my real password, I'll think about giving that up the day some hooded figure is screaming for it and putting a gun to my forehead. Anyone else can just go on dreaming that they know my password.

NOT the professionals. It's the researchers.

I'll happily give away a real password to my account. Of course it'll be a password from a year ago, since we have a 3-month password change policy and I have such a weird memory that I can remember most of my vaguely-pronounceable line noise (probably because I use mnemonics to memorize it to begin with).

Am I also weird for remembering the license plate numbers of my family cars growing up?

Hello therere,

I writing to you as very very trustworthy individual, and endeavorur that you help with this very important task. My father, late of Switzerland, was the CEO of Nestle, and he held in his personal supply 26 million bars of chocolate.

For the last 14 months of his life he was much trying to take this chocolate from Switzerland, but the government stopped him. If you will assist me in this matter you will receive 10% and this is 2.6 million bars of chocolate for assisting myself in this important and ethical matter.

All I require initially as evidence of your superior trustworthiness is the access name and password for your computer systems.

No . Not unless I'm weird too.