Freely subscribe to our NEWSLETTER

“World Password Day is a time to stop and reflect on current password hygiene. Passwords remain one of the biggest cyber challenges for both consumers and businesses around the world as a poor password choice can make it extremely easy for cybercriminals to steal and spy on your data. As humans, we continually gravitate towards creating passwords that are easy to remember and simplistic. Incorporating a birthday or special date within a password is a common denominator, one that cybercriminals are all too aware of. Dangerously, we continue to leave it up to humans to create strong and secure passwords, despite the fact that most people have already been victims of borderline password disclosures from a person’s history of password choices. Having already had your previous password decisions and choices exposed means that an attacker can simply take that as the baseline and from there create variations of that. An effective password should include passphrases, a sequence of random words for added security. Regular consumers should consider deploying and utilizing a password manager to enhance and regularly rotate their log-in credentials.

For organizations, a password manager should be a default implementation. If you are a business leader then you must move beyond just having password managers and start also controlling and protecting privileged access. Privileged access security will help automate, rotate, and secure passwords for you and your business, eliminating a significant amount of cyber fatigue. Taking it a step further, organizations should look beyond just their internal password hygiene and take a deeper dive to look into their suppliers and contractors to ensure password protection. Are they using a password manager, do they have MFA deployed, and how do they protect access to their privileged accounts? We’ve seen the catastrophic domino effect that one poor password choice can have within a supply chain.

Organizations can enhance their password posture by understanding that security starts with the social network around you. Why not encourage your employees’ families to use a password manager and reward them? They see that you’re not just taking care of the company but that you’re actually extending security to the social sphere, so that their family and kids can even extend to using password managers and reduce the threats, because attackers can and will target them first as stepping stones to get into your organization. So it makes you think, why not extend your perimeter to the social sphere around the organization. Your supplier, your contractor, partners, your customers, and everybody.”