There are an increasing number of stories focused on the danger for small businesses of not being secure online. To address this issue and ensure your business is prepared against common hacks and social engineering that target user passwords, here are some of the most common problems faced and how to address them.
“Password” is indeed a bad password to use. You are right to roll your eyes if you hear somebody has used it. But there’s a good chance your password sucks as well. Several different organizations make an annual list but they almost always use the same (lack of) criteria. It’s simply based on how often the password appeared in leaked and stolen databases of account passwords.
A Year in Numbers, Letters, and Special Characters OK, so none of the passwords on this list are as ridiculous as "123456" or "Password" (believe us, plenty of people still use these), but Americans made common password security mistakes in 2020.
Tokyo, midday on a Friday. My phone kept buzzing during my customer meeting. The day was a workday, a day of travel and the day a personal property purchase was due to settle. Little did I know it was also the day I was the target of a “port-out” scam.
Using a password manager removes the need to reuse passwords on multiple sites – something all too many people do for the sake of their sanity. Whenever a website’s password database is exposed online, the first thing many hackers do is check whether the same user credentials will work on other websites, often ones involving more sensitive account data. There’s no way most people can remember a different login for every site, but with a password manager it’s not an issue.
Microsoft recently released a report that highlights cybercriminal activity and the importance of password security. The company's annual Digital Defense Report analyzes cybersecurity trends over the past year based on threats identified by the software company. In 2020, the report covered cybersecurity trends through the end of June, providing insight into cybercrime throughout the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reports like this can help us better protect ourselves from hackers and scammers in the future.
Bad habits die hard, according to SplashData’s eighth annual list of Worst Passwords of the Year. After evaluating more than 5 million passwords leaked on the Internet, the company found that computer users continue using the same predictable, easily guessable passwords.
In the company’s ninth annual installment of the Worst Passwords of the Year list, “donald” is not among the top 25 most dangerous and most commonly leaked passwords by hackers. In other news, “password” has for the first time in the list’s history been knocked out of the top two spots.
The state of password security is best illustrated by looking at the rise in credential stuffing attacks. By combining login software with proxy servers, hackers bombard targets with username and password combinations harvested from previous data breaches. The attacks are usually successful because people tend to re-use weak passwords between online services.
Are your employees helping to keep company data protected and secure? Unfortunately, data breach fatigue has become so common in the past 15 years, that most consumers and employees do not even react to news of a data breach. This means that employees often aren’t doing what they could to keep the privacy of their business intact. With over 80 percent of data breaches arising from password issues, investing in a password manager, like TeamPassword, can ensure that passwords are protected.
Passwords are the gateway to your online accounts, but many people treat them as an afterthought. With access to over 550 million exposed passwords in the public domain, hackers can easily to steal identities, credit card numbers and commit other types of fraud without the need for complex password crackers. ...
