With more businesses operating remotely during the pandemic, cybercrime has become an even more attractive hobby for tech savvy people who want to make a quick buck. In fact, 2020 was a record-breaking year for data breaches and cyber-attacks in general. To put this into perspective, cybercrime went up by 600% when the pandemic first hit us last year.
It isn’t surprising that working from home exposes us to more data breaches. After all, employees have less protection from digital attacks at home than they do in the office. This makes them more vulnerable to cyber criminals who are always looking to exploit vulnerabilities in big organizations whose data is valuable.
This is not to say that hackers only target large organizations. On the contrary, as long as you’re running a business, you should assume that you have data that would be valuable to a hacker. In fact, even as an individual your data could be captured by a hacker who specializes in ransomware. If this data is of any value to you, then you’ll have to pay the hacker to recover this data.
As you can see, anyone can be affected negatively by a data breach. When you’re running a business, you have more people to worry about. This is because a data breach could easily affect your clients, employees and business partners. For this reason, it’s important for business owners to be vigilant when it comes to managing sensitive information.
According to cybersecurity experts, one of the most effective safeguards against hacking is the use of strong, unique passwords for cyber protection. When cyber criminals successfully hack websites and online accounts, they publish lists of usernames, email addresses, and passwords on the Internet. Regardless of whether you’re an average person or a high-profile business owner, your passwords can easily be disclosed and shared widely if you’re not careful about how you operate online. What’s even worse, information that uniquely identifies the user, such as an email address, can exposed. That means a hacker can search for other accounts linked to that person, such as work accounts, personal social media accounts, or bank accounts. When a malicious person discovers those accounts, they can log in using the disclosed password and acquire access if the password has been replicated elsewhere. This is why having a unique password is essential.
If cyber criminals cannot quickly locate or guess your password, they can employ a technique known as brute-forcing. This is a process in which they attempt every conceivable password until they find the one that works. Computers can try dozens of passwords every second. Nevertheless, the hacker needs the password to be easily recognized for this strategy to be worthwhile, so a strong password is a good way of keeping hackers out. Creating a password that is unpredictable can therefore lower the chances of your accounts being hacked.
Since it’s easier to recall actual words than it is to recall random letter combinations, hackers who employ brute-forcing techniques frequently try every word in the dictionary. Switching languages to create a password will not help because this strategy is not confined to English-language dictionaries. Given that many passwords involve a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, and symbols, malicious actors rely on human intuition to narrow down the options. Unfortunately, when we’re asked to set strong passwords, most of us will choose a word, start with an uppercase letter first, then finish with a number and symbol. This makes for a password that is relatively easy to guess.
When it comes to businesses, strong passwords aren’t just advisable – they’re crucial to the operation of the business. After all, just one breach of a corporate network could result in major consequences that can affect an entire industry and every employee. For this reason, password management software can be very useful to protect a company’s online security.
With good password management software, you can not only create strong passwords, but also store them in a safe place. Likewise, you can manage the passwords safely, especially if you have many employees who need to use them. Additionally, an efficient password management software will record any password updates and inform all administrators of these updates in real time.
There are quite a few reasons why companies should use this type of software. Firstly, as mentioned previously, people generally don’t use strong passwords. Since no one likes creating new passwords, most individuals settle for simple, easy-to-remember passwords and then replicate them across all their online accounts. Unfortunately, this strategy also makes it easy for hackers to guess our passwords. Password-cracking software today cycles swiftly over typical patterns and can even be adjusted to include known user information. Passwords that were thought to be secure five years ago are now easy targets.
Additionally, some people simply aren’t good at creating strong passwords. A password is deemed secure if it has a random combination of numbers, symbols, capital letters, and lowercase letters and is 12 characters long. Few people have the patience or aptitude to develop complex passwords for each account, especially if they want to memorize them. Password managers utilize algorithms to generate secure passwords automatically and store them securely so that users don’t have to remember them.
While using the same password across different accounts might make your life easier, this is a potentially risky approach. In a business setting, this can even be disastrous. It means that a single password hack can allow criminals to connect to several services simultaneously, collecting data from each one along the way. When you utilize a password management application, you can easily apply complex and unique passwords to each service, limiting the harm done if one of them is hacked. Password management software may also track password usage and notify management and employees when proper password protocol is not followed.
One of the most efficient ways for cybercriminals to access login passwords is through phishing attacks. Phishing emails pose as legitimate services but redirect recipients to fraudulent login pages designed to steal their passwords. Phishing attacks affect many individuals. However, password managers are not vulnerable to phishing. In order to protect against attacks, a password manager won’t serve up a password if the domain name doesn’t match the records.
Password managers also help companies sync to the cloud. People use various devices to access services, including desktop computers, phones, tablets, and even public computers. Without a password manager, there is no safe way to transfer those credentials across devices. Password managers also support multi-factor authentication. With this strategy, beyond entering your password, you must do something else to confirm you’re the rightful owner of the account you’re trying to access. For instance, you might need to answer a challenge question or enter a PIN number delivered to their phone. Leading password managers offer various two-factor authentication options, which add an extra layer of security to your password manager’s data.
Finally, with a password manager, users can monitor compliance and spot problems. Enterprise password management systems allow IT departments to see what their employees are doing with their passwords, allowing managers to spot and correct non-compliant conduct. A single hacked password might spell devastation. This will never happen with audit and reporting mechanisms in place.
In an attempt to ramp up IT security and help businesses with their password management, Passwork has created a self-hosted password manager for business teams. This system makes dealing with corporate passwords easy. Employees can quickly find the right passwords, with all their company’s data safely stored on their server, while user rights, actions, and changes, are all managed by the administrator. The Passwork team understands the importance of cybersecurity and how crucial strong passwords are for securing sensitive data within a company. Passwork solves three main problems by safely storing self-hosted corporate passwords, working and collaborating with corporate passwords, and helping with administration and management.
Passwork is easy to use. With its light and modern interface, the system is a straightforward solution for all people, not just IT specialists. There are quite a few options to choose from depending on the needs of your company and the number of employees on your team. Each package includes fine-tuning of access rights for each user, management of user rights through roles, reports on the activity of each user, LDAP/AD support, flexible data import and export, two-factor authentication, password security panel, customizable password generator, password history, API integration, and prompt technical support.
To sign up for Passwork or to get more information, click here.
