Why should we use it and what it is?

With October being a month to increase your awareness of cyber security it is a good opportunity to learn and understand the whys behind all the pesky IT recommendations. Today I want to touch on password managers and why you need them.

For almost two years now our personal and professional lives moved to online out of necessity. This situation has created a heaven for cyber criminals who devised very sophisticated ways of gathering our personal data through phishing scams as well as social engineering. Compromised credentials was the most common initial attack vector in 2021. And, since the credentials are what cyber criminals are after we need to concentrate on their protection, and we must start utilizing tools that are specifically designed to do that. Password managers are such tools.

We leave a huge amount of information on social media, and it is out for grabs out there in cyberspace. This information, quite often, is used to steal online passwords (a huge amount of people still uses their kids’, pets’ or spouses’ names, birthdates – easy to remember, right? 66% of those use the same password to access their social media as well as their online bank or Amazon account). It is a matter of a moment for these bits and pieces of our lives to be harvested and used to break into our computers and steal money from our banks or get to our credit cards or steal our identity and create a huge amount of financial problems that take years to resolve. Cyber criminals count on our poor habits and take full advantage of them. We all need to learn to get smarter and break these bad habits. A good password manager will help us do just that. It will help keeping our credentials safe by eliminating a need to remember any password but one, thus allowing us freedom of using any combination of characters, letter, numbers etc.

What is password manager? It is a program that allows users to generate and manage their passwords in a secure way. You can easily generate unique and difficult to guess passwords, which are then remembered and safely stored in the password vault which is encrypted and not accessible by anybody else. All you need to remember then is one password that allows you access to it. A good password manager will fill out your credentials on secure sites eliminating your need to remember and /or type in difficult combination of letters, numbers, special characters, on more than one device (secure access from anywhere). It also allows for secure sharing access of information to people who need to know (your family members, employees, coworkers etc.).

With cyberattacks on the rise and attacks being more frequent and losses becoming more severe it is important for business owners to look deeper into their protection.

Using a business grade password manager allows a company to create cyber security procedures that ensure data safety for the company (i.e., occasional general password changes, which will update the change to all employees having access to it, assigning different password to access different sites, the lengths and complexity of passwords etc.). A good password manager will allow quick password sharing for brand new employees as well as an immediate and painless cancellation of such access to any person who is no longer an employee (we all hear from time to time about a disgruntled employees causing serious trouble, if they still have access to company documentation / data /websites etc.). Utilizing password manager will increase company productivity by decreasing / eliminating time spent on frequent password resetting caused by forgetfulness (we all have enough information to remember, adding multiple passwords to the mix does not help).

Working from home, using personal computers to access company information is creating an additional security risk for a company, which can be partially eliminated by using company password manager. It eliminates the need for employees to record on their personal devices, notepads or spreadsheets, company owned passwords, access to which then can be controlled.

Social media / digital marketing gives other companies or different employees access to company social media accounts / websites etc. This also can be controlled by password sharing through password manager and removing permissions later, when they are no longer needed / employed.

Password manager protects from certain phishing scams, not allowing credentials to be filled into a bogus website. This is particularly important since many of their URLs are so close to the legitimate ones that it is very difficult to recognize them at the first (sometimes even second and third) glance.

So, don’t think twice. Get password manager now and start using it as soon as possible. Twice as important if you are running a company. Average cyber-attack costs have increased drastically in 2021. In Canada (which is ranked third in the world by country) the average cost of data breach has increased from $4.5M in 2020 to $5.4M in 2021, where the organizations with less than 500 employees had a higher average breach costs than small businesses (500-1000 employees). Just take a look at one of the latest data breach reports by IBM.
The statistics are quite alarming. Being a private person or a micro/small business is no longer protection against ransomware attacks either. We get calls for help every month from a ransomware attack affecting the smallest (1-5 employees) companies and individuals. A smart person / business owner should invest in their security.

If you have any questions as to what type of password manager to choose from (there are a lot of them out there and some are better than others) book a free consultation now. We are here to help!

Everyone does IT, we make IT simple!