Stop Letting Weak Passwords Put Your Business at Risk!

Quick—how many passwords do you have to remember? Chances are, it’s more than you might expect… especially when you factor in both your personal ones and those you maintain for your business.

After all, it is risky to the point of irresponsibility to repeat your passwords across accounts, especially those you maintain for your business. This kind of repetition can easily lead to financial losses and reputation damage, as it facilitates a data breach.

Let’s outline an example of how a lax attitude around password security leads directly to significant problems and issues.

Meet “Carl,” a Misguided Employee Just Trying to Be Efficient…

…and what could be more efficient than only having to remember one password? As Carl saw it, as long as his password of choice was secure enough, it wouldn’t be guessed by a hacker. As such, Carl focused on creating the longest, most random password he could:

“dJJ^nme967(ujen_-ibn452”

Carl used this password for everything, from his work accounts to his personal streaming service subscriptions and beyond. Unbeknownst to him, however, one of his social media accounts was compromised. This meant that the attacker responsible could do a bit of digging and identify Carl’s workplace and use that password to access Carl’s work materials, and from there, phish Carl’s coworkers into providing access to more and more sensitive data.

While Carl’s carelessness is a wholly fabricated event, countless businesses have experienced a similar situation to some degree. What’s worse, a relatively simple measure could have prevented Carl’s—and any other employee who has suffered a similar issue’s—problem: a modern, standalone password manager.

Good Password Practices are Essential

Let’s consider Carl’s quandary to see where he went wrong.

In fairness, Carl had the right idea in one regard: he used a password that was more than 12 characters long and consisted of both uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols as randomly as possible. His big mistake was reusing the same password across different accounts.

Best practices dictate that every different account should have a unique password… which means that Carl would likely have dozens of equally complex codes to keep straight in his mind. This is where Carl went wrong, and where a password manager would have helped him.

By using a password manager, Carl could still rely on a single password, as this one password would give him access to a securely encrypted vault where all the rest were saved. These passwords could then be autofilled into the correct fields online, as well as shared with team members who would need access as a group. The password manager would likely even assist him with updating less-than-secure credentials by generating new ones.

For bonus points, Carl would also implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to further increase the inherent security of all his accounts.

Don’t Let the Most Basic Security Measure Be Your Business’ Downfall!

Give us a call at (888) 814-4843 to ask about how we can help you implement password management in your business to boost your security.