Bad Password Practices Are Responsible For Most Data Breaches You Can Do Better

However, with the constant dissemination of personal information on social media or through social engineering, the answers to these prompts are easy to find, making it easy for attackers to breach your user’s accounts. So instead of forcing users to create more complex passwords, ask them to create longer ones if you want to improve password security. Additionally, as password complexity increases, users tend to reuse passwords from account to account, increasing the risk that they could be the victim of a credential stuffing attack if one account is breached. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, compromised passwords are responsible for 81% of hacking-related breaches. Needless to say, a key part of overall information security is securing your users’ passwords. Here are three password security best practices to help protect your accounts from adversaries looking to compromise them for nefarious purposes.

If not, we at Pluralsight encourage you to do so, for security’s sake. Let’s have a look at some of the most commonly implemented password best practices when it comes to security, and compare them with the latest recommendations. The National Institute for Standards and Technology has published a revised set of Digital Identity Guidelines which outlines what is considered password best practices for today. We won’t cover all four volumes of the NIST publication, but I strongly recommend you review them. Forget using hint questions for password recovery since social media and a lack of data privacy help hackers easily find the answers. Stop forcing regular password changes, as most users only alter existing passwords incrementally, which makes for a weak password.

Use the “revise a paraphrase method” while creating your password. Use common and bizarre words such as historical names or words you know in foreign languages. Add random characters in the middle of the password paraphrase.

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Despite Bill Gates’ predictions, however, we have yet to come up with an authentication system that’s as widely adopted as passwords. But is the password still ubiquitous because it’s the perfect authentication mechanism that can’t be improved upon? In fact, passwords have proven time and again that they’re a poor way of protecting valuable information.

This World Password Day, recommit to making it harder for cybercriminals to access your valuable sensitive data by strengthening your password security. As described above, it’s not hard to create strong passwords and keep them safe from bad actors, it just takes a little due diligence. Regardless of whether we’re talking about a password or a PIN, policies that limit length or characters weaken complexity and security.

• This way even if a credential spill happens, hackers will have a tough time deciphering the data.
• A Twitter employee was the target of a social engineering attack that led to their credentials being used to target and compromise 130 verified accounts .
• It is responsible for more incidents than all the other exotic, technically interesting attacks combined.
• The FBI’s resource Protected Voices recommends the use of passphrases over traditional passwords.
• A total of 3.2 Billion such breached credentials are freely available on the web today.
• So if a user can choose, when alone, to have the password displayed during typing, they have a much better shot at entering lengthy passwords correctly on the first try.

The reality is we all end up with an alphabet soup of passwords spread over dozens of various sites and services across the internet. Whilst we might not always practice it, we all know the theory of creating a good password; uniqueness, randomness and length. Take a moment to review these, and consider strengthening some of your passwords if they fall short. In addition, they recommend an additional hash with a salt stored separately from the hashed password. That way, even if the hashed passwords are stolen, brute-force attacks would prove impractical. Many companies ask their users to reset their passwords every few months, thinking that any unauthorized person who obtained a user’s password will soon be locked out.

Five Best Practices For Password Hygiene

Sometimes, it takes no more than a few attempts to break in. Passwords of corporate accounts should be randomized at periodic intervals – ideally once in 45 days or 90 days. It is reported that it takes a few months for hackers to exploit the stolen credentials. Periodic password randomization helps avoid credential abuse. When it comes to storing customer data, many organizations are still storing sensitive data like passwords in plain-text. A few others were found to be using weak hashing algorithms like MD5 or SHA-1.

In addition, if your password is connected to you personally, then someone who knows you may be able to figure it out. The next step in the data protection and business continuity process for virtually any organization is an effective backup strategy. And the good news is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel here. This means that data should be saved in at least three locations — one on the computer, one on easy-to-access local storage and another on offsite storage. The options range from local disk, to removable media, to the cloud and even tape. And, if at least one copy is ‘air-gapped,’ meaning completely unplugged from the network, all the better.

Despite fulfilling old-school password complexity requirements, many passwords are not safe. For example, common passwords (like ‘Loveyou1’ or ‘Admin2020’) can be too easily guessed. CISArecommendsfollowing the NIST password guidelines, which include screening for compromised passwords. CISA’s Bad Practices list contains a collection of exceptionally risky cybersecurity practices.

This is an increase from 2015, when the stat was that 51% of web application breaches were attributable to stolen credentials. If anything is clear, it’s that the lowly credential theft is a clear and present danger in information security. It is responsible for more incidents than all the other exotic, technically interesting attacks combined. Industry analysts repeatedly point out that more than 80% of data breaches involve stolen credentials. This leads to a sort of complacency with respect to adopting the security basics. Almost all of the victim organizations too believed ‘this won’t happen to us’ and eventually faced the attack.

World Password Day 2022: Bad Password Practices Can Be Costly

Look for new functionality in your user account management system, as some other vendors are starting to integrate this functionality. Encourage the use of password managers, and allow copy & paste in the data entry fields. Even if you have a strong password, it is important to use a different one for every account you use.

Many people don’t know what constitutes a strong password. There are a lot of different guidelines regarding what’s a good password versus a bad password. In 2007, Microsoft researchers found out that the average user has about 25 accounts that require passwords . With a bit of effort, you can probably create tens of different passwords that are impossible to guess , but you’ll find it really hard to memorize them and remember which one goes where. “BrAveZ!2” might be only eight characters long , but it contains three uppercase letters, an exclamation mark, and a digit, which means that with an entropy of around 30 bits, it’s harder to crack. The fact that the password isn’t a name or a word that could be easily connected to him makes it difficult to guess as well.

And we’ll speak more to hashing and salting a little later in this article. But for now, let’s continue on with our list of compliance-related considerations. We develop data management software solutions designed to make encryption accessible and bring simplicity and organization to your everyday online life.

Passwords with a sexual connotation or using swearwords are very widely used, and therefore highly vulnerable to a guessing or dictionary attack. CISA encourages all organizations to review their Bad Practicesweb pageand “engage in the necessary actions and critical conversations” to address these issues. Then, once organizations are ready to fix these bad habits,Enzoiccan help. Even if your organization uses authenticator apps or devices for your MFA authentication, ensuring that the most ubiquitous layer—the password layer—is secure is a critical step.

Cybercriminals Use Coronavirus

They should, however, stop using references to them in their passwords. Though organizations certainly require advanced technologies and a variety of cybersecurity arsenals, losing sight of the security basics often leads to attacks. Password security is the foundation of information security. Periodically review the password usage across the organization and verify if any of the passwords used by employees matches the list of compromised credentials available on the web. Recently, an intern at Solarwinds was blamed of using “solarwinds123” as the password for a file server and it was discovered as being available on the internet by a researcher.

Hackers could use the credentials to gain unauthorized access to various networks. But poor password security practices give rise to credential spill in the first place. This page, and indeed our entire business, exists to help make passwords more secure, not less. While no Internet-connected system can be guaranteed to be impregnable, we keep the risks to an absolute minimum and firmly believe that the risk of unknowingly using compromised passwords is far greater.

“CodyBanks8”, the password he’s chosen, has ten characters, with one digit and two uppercase letters. According to the zxcvbn algorithm, it has an entropy of around 23 bits, which is far from ideal. Being a proud and loving grandfather, Hal has also posted a picture of the small boy on his Instagram feed , and he has written his grandson’s name in the caption. To meet various business needs, programmatic access of various IT resources and databases is required. Developers normally tend to hardcode the passwords on applications, scripts, and configuration files. Hardcoding should be avoided; instead, the passwords should be securely stored in a digital vault and the applications could programmatically access the credentials using APIs.

Banish These Common Passwords Now And Employ These Tips For Better Password Security

Part of the reason is because people are tired of spending 10.9 hours per year entering and/or resetting passwords. Therefore, if password practices don’t change, companies and people are increasing their risks for a computer security breach. Never recycle old passwords or use the same password across multiple accounts.

It’s important not to use a single email account for business and personal correspondence. This can result in a massive data loss when a cybercriminal cracks your password and gains access to your email account. It is important to keep your password list secure so that it can’t be easily found by others, and to hide any physical record that contains your credentials. Using the same passwords for several accounts may be convenient, but you’re making it easier for cybercriminals to gain access to multiple accounts, should they be able to break into one account.

The way it works is that you install a digital certificate that onto a user’s machine that ties the identity of an organization or individual to that device. This provides client authentication by having your device authenticate itself to the server without you ever having to type in a password. Sure, you can potentially reduce costs by automating the password reset process. But you’ll still run into the issues of users creating simple passwords and sharing passwords. We’ll answer these questions and also go over some quick password security tips as well at the end (for those of you who don’t want to read the entire article). This, common sense dictates, means that passwords are far from ideal when it comes to verifying our identity on the Internet.

Focus On User Experience To Improve Password Security

Since our database of compromised passwords is far larger than what could be downloaded to the browser, the compromised password check we perform must occur server-side. Thus, it is necessary for us to submit a hashed version of your password to our server. To protect this data from eavesdropping, it is submitted over an SSL connection.

Components Of Strong Password Security

Passwords have been part of computer security since 1960, when Fernando Corbató added passwords for personal files to MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System . And almost immediately, they became, as Corbató himself admitted, “a nightmare.” Since then, all sorts of bad advice has been disseminated about how to use, manage, and change passwords. Are you and your business practicing these updated password best practices?

Protect Your Password List

The use of password managers should be encouraged and supported by ensuring users can paste into password data entry fields. Password managers , generate, synchronize, back up, and store passwords across multiple software and devices. This is all done in an encrypted form for powerful added security. NIST has deprecated the widely-adopted practice of regularly changing your password management enterprise password, in case hackers have information without your knowledge. The argument against this practice lies with the human trait to select a password sequence or pattern to ease the workload of remembering passwords. So, what a user tends to do is add a number or other incremental character at the end of their current password each time they are forced to change it.

Okay, so there are a lot of things that go into having strong password security. But what if you could take one thing out of the equation that makes password security easy for users and more manageable for your IT security team? This is where passwordless security (i.e., https://globalcloudteam.com/ passwordless authentication) comes into play. MFA factors include what you know , what you have , and who you are . Avoid using simple dictionary words because such passwords are easily guessed, and are vulnerable to dictionary-based and brute force attacks.