Blogs and Posts

Why Your Employees Should Use Password Managers

• By: Garry Feldman
• Date: August 30, 2017

Password managers can significantly increase your business’s overall ability to prevent and combat cyber security threats.

Passwords present a double-edged sword in this modern era of business cyber security. On the one hand, strong passwords are an absolute must-have starting point for all system protections. On the other, employees have to juggle more passwords than ever these days, and each individual password can have different requirements. E.g.: one requires a capital letter and a symbol, whereas another may require a symbol and a number.

The proliferation of passwords and hard-to-remember requirements encourages employees to do careless things, like make their password ridiculously easy to remember while also making it susceptible to brute force attacks.

Your best solution? Implement a company-wide password management system. These tools use strong encryption to protect password data, and they can help employees manage all log-ins through a single portal. Simply put: instead of dozens of passwords to remember, they just need one. Learn more about the importance of password managers and how they can benefit your cyber security defenses by reading on.

Most Employee Passwords Are Frighteningly Simple

If you think most people have caught up to what “strong cyber security” means in 2016, think again. According to a recent survey by one popular password management software provider, some of the most commonly used passwords are enough to make anyone cringe.

An astounding 17 percent of those surveyed used “123456” as a password for managing user accounts. The top 10 most frequently used passwords have barely shifted at all over the past several years, meaning password-cracking hacker tools can quickly run down a list of common possibilities to hack a password in seconds.

Many users also think that switching up common passwords like “123qwerty” with variations like “1q2w3erty” can throw off password-cracking software, when in reality running through these variations also takes very little time.

Perhaps most-worrisome of all, “password” was the eighth-most common password used!

Employees need to understand that password strength is a serious issue that must be considered as important as any company policy. Even the most seemingly minor accounts can become a vulnerability for the company’s entire system if an intruder is allowed to access them, potentially costing that business millions following a data breach.

How a Password Manager Helps With Business Cyber Security

Password managers offer powerful tools for employees with the side benefit of making their life far more convenient. Rather than having to deal with a portfolio of passwords for company systems, email, vendor websites, and more, the employee simply has to provide a single password or authentication measure to access their password manager.

In turn, the password manager stores encrypted passwords using the strongest password creation practices possible. It can also cycle passwords periodically to dramatically reduce the risk of commonly reused or continually used passwords. Some systems even provide comprehensive analytics to monitor employee password use, including data for the number of employees who de-activate recommended two-factor authentication.

Overall, password managers make life better for employees and more secure for the company they work for. Explore your options for implementing a company-wide password management system integrated into all of your employees’ accounts by speaking with a cyber security consulting company today.