Every year, businesses invest millions in cybersecurity—from VPNs and firewalls to penetration testing and phishing awareness. Yet despite these layers, breaches still occur. The weak link? Passwords. Without strong password security best practices, even the best defenses can fail. Protecting your company starts by securing the one thing hackers exploit most: user credentials.
Why Password Security Still Fails:
Every year businesses invest millions of dollars improving their cyber defenses to stay ahead of evolving security threats. They reinforce firewalls and update malware detection and intrusion software. They use VPNs, data encryption and conduct penetration testing to identify new vulnerabilities.
They encourage employees to use passwords and educate them as to the latest scams.
Despite all these efforts and expenses, cybersecurity often comes down to two things: password strength and integrity. Passwords are usually the only thing standing between a hacker and your customer data, business plans and confidential personal information.
You can put as many locks on the doors as you want, but they’re all worthless if you give away the keys.
When it comes to password creation, left to their own devices people usually default to the easiest things to remember like pet names, birthdates and anniversaries, phone numbers, old street names, etc.
They will use and reuse the same root password or slight variations across multiple accounts and services, magnifying the impact of a single compromised password. They will share them with co-workers via text and voice messages or jot them down on sticky notes. Human-created passwords are generally short and rarely contain special characters, making them extremely easy to crack, as shown in this chart from security.org.
The Risks of Weak and Reused Passwords
The consequences of weak passwords and careless sharing habits in one’s personal life can be financial loss and identity theft for the individual. For businesses, however, compromised passwords can have greater implications.
Hackers can install malware to paralyze IT systems until a ransom is paid, steal customer data and intellectual property, and execute fraudulent financial transactions. If breached, businesses operating in regulated industries can be exposed to costly penalties and fines for non-compliance.
Yet many employees continue to practice poor password hygiene and refuse to activate features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) unless compelled to do so.
Global Trends in Password Habits
A study by KnowBe4, a cybersecurity awareness and prevention platform, gathered data on the password habits of 2,000 corporate employees in Denmark and Sweden and discovered a significant percentage are not practicing good hygiene. Findings include:
- Nearly 20% of Danish employees admit to using short passwords because they are easier to remember, and 8% use the same password for all their accounts.
- Sweden polled a little better, with 13% using short passwords and under 6% reusing them across multiple accounts.
- Over 33% of Danish employees and 11% of Swedish employees don’t know what MFA is.
- 40% of Danes and nearly 49% of Swedes have access to password managers, but only a tiny fraction actively uses them.
To be fair, Scandinavian societies are renowned for being among the safest in the world. Denmark and Sweden have some of the lowest rates for physical and cybercrime due to strong public safety nets and high levels of communal trust, so these users may not feel as obligated to activate security features as others.
That’s a mistake, as cybercriminals rarely respect international borders. But when you extrapolate those numbers across much larger and densely populated markets in Europe, Asia and North America where cyberthreats are more common, even a sliver of these percentages represents a tremendous risk for businesses.
Password Security Best Practices for Businesses
So, while organizations can beef up their firewalls and antivirus scanning all they want, the best first line of defense is to make the use of a password manager mandatory for all employees. A good password manager application will:
- Apply consistent rules around the strength, sharing, and reuse of passwords.
- Securely store and encrypt all user credentials and associated information.
- Provide centralized control and tracking over all user activity.
- Support advanced features like MFA with single sign-on (SSO) for extra protection.
- Help protect against breaches resulting in compliance violations and penalties.
- Eliminate the weakest link in your cyber defenses: human-generated passwords.
Features That Enforce Best Practices at Scale
Passpack delivers all this and much more.
This centralized password management solution gives an organization’s password administrator 100% visibility and complete control over all users and password-related activities. Passpack’s built-in random password generator sets minimum thresholds for password length, strength and special character use, ensuring everyone creates strong passwords.
Passpack supports an unlimited number of users, passwords and teams. Users can be grouped into teams (and be a member of multiple teams) to share common resources and enable administrators to apply rules around password sharing for role-based access control. Admins can on- and off-board users without affecting the access privileges of other team members.
All data stored in a Passpack account is protected with end-to-end AES 256-bit encryption to keep information secure while in transit and at rest, and Passpack offers several features to safely import, export, delete and transfer password ownership. Other Passpack features supporting best security practices include:
- Ability to set limits for password expiration and rules for reuse.
- Restricting which domains can join the organization’s Passpack environment.
- Prohibiting team members from sharing passwords with users at specific domains.
- Support for two-factor authentication and YubiKey authentication.
- Session logout timers and entry attempt limits for automatic lockout.
- IP Address and login histories of every action for traceability in the event of a breach.
- Comprehensive user activity reporting and auditing.
- Emergency access codes and the ability to restore recently deleted passwords.
- Zero-Knowledge security model means not Passpack personnel, nor any third party ever has access to your confidential information.
Implement Password Security Best Practices at No Risk with a FREE 28-day Passpack Trial
Give your employees the means to create their own passwords and adhere to best practices as defined by your organization. Without secure password management, your other cyber defenses are little more than window dressings, as they can’t stop a criminal with compromised credentials from masquerading as an authorized employee.
Putting locks on your virtual doors? Start your FREE 28-day trial today to see how easy it is to make unbreakable keys and enforce best practices with Passpack.