May 6th will see people all over the planet take part in World Password Day editing and updating the multi-character credentials they have adopted to secure their personal accounts. While the original concept of a password day predates the annual celebrated since 2013, official World Password Day now takes place each year on the first Thursday of the month of May.
The yearly event has been designed to remind people across the world of how important passwords are to protect private and confidential information, the best practices for using them and what kinds of characters should combine to create crypto keys to make them safe from cybercrime.
In the following sections we’ll look at the history of World Password Day and how individuals, companies, institutions, and organisations all over the globe can mark the occasion with more secure approaches to password creation and use.
How World Password Day began
In 2005, a book called “Perfect Passwords” written by Mark Burnett, a security researcher, encouraged people to pick one day every year to alter the passwords they use. The idea faded from prominence for many years until 2013 when Intel Security launched World Password Day to promote better practices of data protection.
What are the best practices for passwords use?
Enterprise passwords should be updated on a monthly basis at least, and staff should never be allowed to select their own. Constantly changing credentials can ensure that if they are shared, potential risks are limited to a shorter time frame while passwords set by IT security personnel can ensure they are robust enough to be unguessable by attackers.
The same passwords should never be used for multiple accounts, to minimise the impact of credentials falling into the wrong hands.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) here in the UK recently confirmed that most people are still using weak passwords, with many employing favourite sports teams and the names of pets and loved ones as their chosen code. The danger of this way of creating passwords is that this information can often be obtained on social media where people support football teams, show pictures of their pets, and send birthday wishes to family and friends.
The latest advice from the NCSC is to build passwords from three unrelated words. This can make them hard to crack by cybercriminals but easy to remember for users.
Keeping data safe with secure passwords
At Galaxkey, we understand that access to a private password presents threat operators with a passport to enter company data storage whether information is kept in enterprise email accounts or backed up on online servers. When hackers and scammers infiltrate business networks, they can often steal passwords retained in browsers and log-in pages before using them to access sensitive data.
With this in mind, our secure platform never stores private passwords and offers cutting-edge encryption to ensure all data at rest or in transit is always indecipherable to unauthorised entities. Celebrate World Password Day with a free 14-day trial of our secure system and protect your private credentials and company data from criminal attacks.
