Oracle staff to stop using passwords as security measure

By 2025, employees of tech giant Oracle will no longer log into the American company's systems using passwords.

- Zhaki Abdullah

"They are just not secure," said Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison.

The 80-year-old pointed this out in his keynote address on Sept 10 at the Oracle CloudWorld conference held at the Venetian Convention and Expo Centre in Las Vegas.

Describing the use of passwords as obsolete and "very dangerous", he said the complicated requirements of modern passwords - requiring a mix of special characters and numbers in addition to letters - mean users often write passwords down and reuse them, leading to such passwords being stolen and sold.

Stolen passwords are increasingly responsible for data breaches.

According to an IBM report, its incident response team saw a 71 per cent increase in the number of attacks using stolen log-in credentials in 2023, compared with the year before.