In this digital age, data security and password protection are a daily, even hourly, fact of life. There’s a continuous flow of news about security breaches and hacks. A company like Yahoo! couldn’t defend itself against hackers who were able steal 500 million user accounts, and even iPhones, thought to be un-hackable, have been proven to be hacked.
At the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas in August, Thycotic, a cybersecurity software company, found that over 75 percent of the hackers in attendance who responded to their survey said they believed no password was safe from hackers or the government. Moreover, nearly half of them said they would hack a password or phone for a fee ($50,000 to $100 million or more) if asked by the FBI.
For early stage entrepreneurs, it can be easy to ignore the significant impact of getting hacked or exposing confidential information. So many other mission critical tasks and decisions overshadow taking preventive measures to protect your digital and customer assets.
As a result, we are often our own biggest security threats, doing things like using really predictable, easy to remember passwords; using the same passwords over and over; and letting our browsers save our passwords. What we don’t realize is that by creating such simplistic ways of accessing our most important information, we lose that first line of defense against a hack: strong passwords.
Creating secure passwords and managing them well doesn’t have to take a lot of time or be a thorn in your side.
Here are ways you can create, protect and store passwords, helping you to stay safe, sane and efficient in your day-to-day.
