Passwords.
We hear about them all the time. Every week, over a million passwords get stolen and many of them are published or sold on the Dark Web.
Do you know how to maintain secure log-in credentials on all of your online accounts? Are you double-locking them with multi-factor authentication?
Did you know that all of this can also affect whether or not you are cyber-compliant with data privacy regulations?!
Why Secure Password Management Matters
Weak passwords are behind over 80% of data breaches. Brute-force attacks like password spraying can also break weak credentials in less than a minute. If your password is easy to guess or based on real-life experiences, like your dog’s name or the street where you grew up, then spear-phishers can often glean that information from your social media profiles.
To maintain its integrity, a strong password needs to be at least twelve characters and made up of numbers, symbols and letters. You should change them about every two or three months. Remember, every account needs a unique password!
Now, it’s impossible to constantly memorizing new alphanumeric combinations unless you have a photographic memory. It’s dangerous to reuse the same password on multiple accounts too! That’s where a good password management system comes in. It securely generates, stores, and auto-retrieves your passwords, thereby making it even easier to access your various accounts without compromising security
Secure password management strategies like these are required under most data privacy laws. Whether it’s healthcare regulations stipulating proper protected health information (PHI) security, or a financial institution beholden to secure banking directives, your accounts need to be locked tight with the latest best practices in safe password management.
Choosing a Good Password Manager
When considering a password manager, consider an open-source program. Open-source means that the source code is publicly available, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, and distribute it. In this situation, there’s no such thing as “too many cooks in the kitchen.” On the contrary, the more people who inspect and add to the security of the program, the safer your data and the quicker they can spot vulnerabilities and suspicious anomalies. More eyes on a project helps find hidden backdoors, malicious snippets of code, and other weaknesses that can then be patched immediately.
Closed-source code has its benefits too, especially if you want to keep emerging software out of the public eye and maintain control over its dispersal. When it comes to your password vaults, however, having a community of developers can contribute to faster bug fixes and new feature roll-outs.
Whether you personally understand how to read open-source code doesn’t matter. The ability to inspect the inner workings demonstrates the trustworthiness and accountability of your password management program.
How to Keep Accounts and Passwords Safe
When it comes to your passwords, you can’t take too much precaution. There’s no such thing. It takes hackers millions of years (yes, you read that right) to crack an account with strong credentials. Compare that with the mere minutes it takes to hack a weak password, and you see why that’s the biggest cause of data breaches against major organizations right now!
Just remember that businesses must train you about proper password management is a requirement to comply with data protection regulations and standards. That goes beyond creating long, complex passwords and storing them in a secure, open-source vault. It also means employing multi-factor authentication whenever possible. With MFA, even if somebody guesses or breaks through your password, they need an additional form of ID to prove that they’re an authorized user on the account.
The most secure MFA methods are biometric authentication and authenticator apps. Biometrics encompass your unique fingerprints, retinas, face and voice to confirm your identity. Think about how you sign into your phone with your thumb or by looking into the camera! These can’t be replicated by anyone on Earth, so threat actors will have a tough time proving they’re an authorized user on your account.
Authenticator apps, on the other hand, generate one-time passwords that are time sensitive. They can use numbers or even QR codes. This is considered more secure than an SMS code or email, because vulnerabilities like SIM swapping allow threat actors to intercept these communications.
Password Security Means Safety for Everyone
In a connected organization, the breach of one account can lead to the downfall of the whole network. We all contribute to incident prevention and incident response.
When it comes to secure password management, a few extra steps adds millions of years of security to your account! MFA, complex combinations, and password managers can help you stay super cyber-compliant and secure.
