Password sharing is a critical aspect of organizational cybersecurity, helping to prevent data breaches and ensuring secure access management.
Today, virtually every digital service, account, system, application and website is password protected and if it’s not, it should be. Otherwise, it’s like leaving the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked – you’re just asking for the car to be stolen.
In team-based business environments where multiple employees need access to shared digital resources to do their jobs, they must all have a key or you’re just asking for the data to be stolen.
One option is to give each user their own unique key and leave them to their own devices to govern password use without centralized administration, but pretty soon you’ll have keys lying all over the place getting lost, stolen, or copied, and you’ll never be able to track them all.
Who used the car last? Where is it parked? Are the doors locked? You’ll never know.
With potentially hundreds or more valid passwords unlocking every asset – and little control over password strength or sharing practices – your threat surface is exponentially multiplied.
The bigger your workforce, the bigger the threat. Another option is to ask all team members to share a single password for each asset, passwords that you control and keep safely under your own lock and key.
Effective secure password sharing mechanisms are crucial in preventing data breaches within organizations of any size. Solutions like PassPack enable the secure sharing of passwords and credentials, mitigating the threat of a breach caused by poor password management and sharing practices.
The Importance of Secure Password Sharing
Don’t overthink this. Cybercriminals want your data. Financial data to steal funds or initiate fake purchase orders. Customer databases to sell identities on the dark web. Product designs for corporate espionage or to hold your company for ransom. They start by trying to compromise passwords.
Given that almost three-quarters of all cyberattacks can be traced to weak credentials, unsecure password storage and sharing policies, and ever-more sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks, an attempted breach is only a matter of time.
Yet your employees still need access to common digital resources, and that means sharing passwords. Secure password sharing is the answer. A secure password manager application allows authorized users to freely access networked resources and share passwords without exposing credentials beyond trusted team members.
It eliminates the possibility of lost or forgotten passwords, protects sensitive data, and helps maintain compliance to insulate the organization from breaches and the fines and damages that follow.
A password manager enables secure password storage and sharing through encryption, limits sharing to only authorized users and applications, and provides audit trails of password use and detailed reporting to trace the origins of any breach.
Moreover, a password manager enhances security by providing users with a secure alternative to storing password lists in unsafe places like spreadsheets, web browsers, and on sticky notes. Check out this case study to learn how easy it was for Dented Brick Distillery employees to swap out lists of passwords kept on spreadsheets for Passpack.
Password management should therefore be considered a critical part of your overall cybersecurity stack, on equal footing with malware threat detection, VPNs, firewalls, and disaster recovery plans. Passpack is the tool that puts you in the driver’s seat of your organization’s password management strategy.
Enable Secure Password Sharing with Passpack
So, given the critical need in the organization to share passwords for both security and productivity reasons, you need to enable them to do so securely. Passpack takes password ownership away from employees and places it under the auspices of a centralized password administrator.
Authorized team members retain unfettered access to the shared resources they need to do their jobs without calls to the help desk for lost password resets.
They have the ability to create and securely share passwords to new accounts and services as needed with other team members, while the admin has a 360° view of, and ultimate control over, all password-related activity. Here’s how Passpack enables secure password sharing among team members:
- Administrators have original password creation capabilities and can modify, delete, and share out passwords as needed with complete control over individual users and teams of users.
- Administrators have control over end user permissions, i.e. who is allowed to create, change, or only see passwords.
- Administrators create password rules and policies that are consistently enforced across the organization. A built-in password generator allows the admin to set minimum thresholds for length and strength, special characters, expiration periods, and more when an employee (with proper permissions) creates a new password.
- When sharing passwords between admins and users, all communications employ end-to-end military grade encryption to protect credentials while in transit.
- Advanced domain and access control features allow admins to block users from sending passwords to recipients not at an approved URL or domain.
- All users have their own personal Packing Key, an encrypted code that must be entered each time before the user is allowed to access their own information. This provides an additional layer of protection against passwords being compromised. Only people with a Passpack account and a Packing Key can see the information that has been shared with them.
- Passpack supports two-factor authentication. Before sharing a password, it forces users to provide a second piece of data to prove they are not imposters.
- Passpack supports the use of Yubi Keys, another type of multi-factor authentication that uses USB fobs containing authentication codes that are inserted into a device to prove user identity before granting access.
- Administrators can monitor the activity of any account to see if attempts are being made to compromise it, or if the user is performing unusual or suspicious actions.
- Employees can be quickly off boarded to cancel access without impacting other users.
Together, these features and capabilities give organizations total control over sensitive business information, mitigating the threat of a breach originating from an employee improperly sharing credentials with other users inside or outside the organization.
With Passpack, you’ll always know where employees leave the keys, and the car will be right where they left it.
Shut Out Intruders and Keep Passwords In
Most businesses focus on mitigating external security threats first. In doing so they may overlook some basic internal mechanisms that can go a long way towards insulating the business from cyberthreats.
Passpack is a simple, cost-effective tool that puts you in control over protected digital assets with forced secure password sharing between authorized users.
See how easy it is to protect your business from the inside out. We invite you to take advantage of a 28-day free trial of our Business Plan to make Passpack a core part of your cybersecurity stack.