Why complex pa55w0rdz don’t work…..
May 20, 2010 Leave a Comment
Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, DropBox, ShareFile….. that’s why!
It’s very simple. You can’t stop staff trying to extend their days or be available 24 x 7, and it’s not just the younger Generation Y workers. Gen X and even boomers have now shifted from work life balance to work life integration….. So what’s this got to do with passwords?
It’s data loss…
Todays connected staff want to carry on their good work on that important spreadsheet or presentation at home, and the best way is the simplest way, email it or upload it to their home and personal account. Instant data loss! What protects this corporate data? A weak password.
Probably their wife’s name, kid’s name, a pet’s name or if they are security conscious they may have included their date of birth to help throw in a few numbers. And this is all very public information, but if you don’t know it just ask for it.
A recent blog claimed that as long as general questions are used as a ‘forgot password’ backup, most web authentication is no more secure than personal knowledge questions.
Joseph Bonneau from the University of Cambridge wrote that with incidents such as Sarah Palin‘s web mail account being hacked and the taking of Twitter documents from a Gmail account, the questions and answers for forgotten passwords are easy to look up online, often found in public records, and easy for friends and acquaintances to guess.
So Security Manager – do you know what data is leaving your network? No? Speak to Varidion and we will show you…..

The march of Social Networking applications into the Enterprise continues, with Facebook use increased by 192% and Google Apps was found in use at 82% of companies monitored. The facts are simple, you can’t stop the march of the Social Enterprise, your Employees will use these next generation Web 2.0 applications to do their job so best you learn how to manage & control these. However, there’s the rub, most technologies today can only turn these applications Off or On so restricting access to the good along with the bad. At Varidion with our Partner 