A new survey is showing that the younger generation—what we might dub the social generation—of teens are a bit less smart with their online security than the one before. Just like interacting with the real world, it’s equally important to understand the basic rules of sanitation when running around in a virtual environment and common sense seems to be slipping. According to an article at MSNBC,

Since many people use the same password to log into multiple sites (41 percent), this makes the chances of being hacked on other password-protected pages even greater.

“We weren’t surprised about the results because this younger demographic tends to be more naive when it comes to Web security, which leads to careless habits that put their identities at risk,” said Jeff Horne, Director of Threat Research at Webroot.

However, today’s youth isn’t the only group making critical mistakes that put their identities at risk. About 41 percent of all age groups also said they have shared passwords with at least one person in the past year.

“Wash your hands after using the bathroom,” “Don’t use the same password across different sites,” “Look both ways before crossing the street.” We could add the middle quote to all these well-known Sesame Street mantras and it would fit in extremely well. One of the pronounced issues that anyone who uses the web today is that every single website wants to give us a login, and as a result we need some sort of memory aid to recall how to access our account next time. And what’s the easiest? Use the same username and password for every site.

Why does this become a problem? The answer should be obvious: if a malicious person gets our password for one site, and they know other places we hang out (or guess), they suddenly have access to all of our hangouts.

An obvious trick to get around this is to develop some sort of easy mnemonic. Sure, use a similar password across sites, but tack on something unique for each site that reminds you of that site. Like add the word “z1llion” to the Google password (Google is a very large number so is a zillion) or add the word “maxilla” to your Facebook password (the maxilla is a bone in the face.) While an attacker might get one password, they’ll find themselves quickly discouraged when they cannot access anything else, they probably won’t guess that you’re using the same complex password for the first part but tacking something simpler onto the end that’s site dependent.

Currently, sites geared towards teens and young adults spend a lot of time and energy on educational warnings about passwords, phishing, and hack attempts—and they either spend a lot of time regaining accounts or just burning them when the users lose them—but really what needs to happen is a cultural shift in our Internet-awareness education.

We really need either some sort of at-home instruction or in-school class centered on cybersecurity and sanitation. Privacy isn’t as simple as it used to be and while it’s true that to a teen there’s very little to lose (a little bit of reputation, a few thousand posts on your favorite forum, your favorite MMO character) this sort of behavior becomes disastrous when money is on the line later in life.

Extremely popular Massively Multiplayer Online Games suffer a great deal of hacking and account theft, to the exception that games like WoW have implemented two-tier security: players must both enter a password and use a special fob authenticator that coughs up a random number every 3 minutes. Either the population will start having to get a little smarter about how it treats its secrets or we’re going to have to end up with more and more technological solutions for what’s really a cultural problem.

In other teen news, Blake Robbins and Jalil Hassan won a $610k settlement from a Pennsylvania school district, sued for spying on students at home via webcam.