It has become the bane of many office workers’ existences: being forced to use complicated and difficult-to-remember passwords laden with random numbers and symbols.

But the man who originally came up with the rules on safe passwords has admitted that his guidance was totally wrong, 14 years after it was first published.

Bill Burr wrote what has become the “bible” on password security in 2003 while working for the US Government. It advised using capital letters, numbers and non-alphabetic symbols in passwords, in the belief that they would be more difficult to guess.