Are Passwords Still The Best Way To Keep My Business Secure?

All the experts agree that passwords are here to stay, but you need to think about other ways to keep your data secure and your users authenticated.

- Nik Rawlinson

“Passwords aren’t the best security solution,” Yaron Baitch, LastPass’ senior director of products, told us. “Their strength depends on humans, who are prone to errors… but they are cheap, scale well and don’t require a lot of technical expertise to implement, so they’ve been difficult to replace.”

The problem, Baitch explained, is that too many of us recycle the same password across multiple accounts (of those who do vary their credentials, 39% create more secure passwords for their personal logins than they do for business). So, if staff credentials have been leaked somewhere else, someone outside of your business could have the keys to your network.

That’s more chilling when you consider that, according to Sophos estimates, 150 million user records were exposed in the Adobe breach of 2013, while almost a billion records were involved in the 2016 Yahoo leak.

“Your entire life [can] come tumbling down because someone has access to that single password,” said Will Moore of 1 Password creator Agile Bits, but that doesn’t mean passwords have had their day. The key is tomix things up, he said. “Every website you log into needs to have a different and secure password. That’s the only way a password will remain secure now.”

Both 1 Password and Last Pass help: they can generate and store passwords to be filled in automatically when the user next needs them, removing the burden of remembering each one, or the temptation to write them down.

My1 Login performs a similar function, working with a wide range of online services and local applications, but it hides the password from the weakest link in the chain: the end user.