This is the 18th time that Safer Internet Day has taken place and each year it aims to raise awareness of emerging online issues and current concerns.
So, it’s apt that tomorrow, we will be working with one of our clients to educate their new staff on staying safe online and how the simple things they do can make a huge difference to the cyber security of their company.
One straightforward aspect of cyber security that we will be looking at is passwords.
Technology company Acronis recently published a report where they surveyed 3400 IT Managers across 17 countries. Their study found that around 80% of global companies have no password policy at all and even among those that do, the passwords being used are often very weak. In fact, they discovered that 15-20% of corporate passwords include the company’s name.
This leads onto another report finding which was that ‘password stuffing’ was the second-most common type of cyberattack in 2020, just behind phishing. This type of attack involves cyber criminals using lists of compromised user credentials to gain access to accounts and websites. The reason this attack method is so successful is because people often reuse usernames and passwords across different accounts and services.
Do you use your company name in your work password? Perhaps you use the same password for accessing your personal accounts as you do your work account?
This is why having strong, unique passwords for all your online accounts is so important and why I will be talking about this subject tomorrow on Safer Internet Day.
One tip I will be sharing is that you can use your internet browser to suggest and save strong passwords so that there’s no need to design or remember each individually. If you only do one thing this Safer Internet Day give this a try.
