6 Essential Password Security Tips For Your Business

Your business’s passwords are the keys to your sensitive data. Safeguarding them is essential in an age where hackers leverage clever social engineering attacks and sophisticated malware to steal login credentials. Protecting your company’s passwords requires a holistic strategy. Here are some tips that may help:

1. Set Complex Passwords

Hackers use various tools and techniques to guess passwords, like brute force and dictionary attacks. These attacks attempt to guess passwords by trying many combinations in a short period. Using sophisticated passwords is an excellent way to protect your login credentials from such attacks.

• Passwords should be at least 12 characters long.
• Passwords must feature uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
• Passwords must not carry common words or numerical patterns.

2. Change Your Passwords

Experts learned that the extortionist gang responsible for the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack used an old password from a legacy Virtual Private Network (VPN) account to breach their network defenses. Periodically changing passwords for company systems can mitigate the risk of a hacker using a stolen password to breach your cybersecurity defenses.

3. Use Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)

MFA is an excellent way to prevent threat actors from using stolen passwords against your business. With MFA, even if a hacker has the correct username and password, they must authenticate their identity in another way to access an account.

4. Train Your Employees

Unfortunately, employees are often the weakest link in terms of password security. Hackers nowadays use social engineering attacks like phishing emails to deceive employees into sharing sensitive information such as usernames and passwords. Training employees to recognize phishing attacks can help.

5. Utilize Endpoint Security

In addition to cybersecurity training, an endpoint security solution is an excellent way to protect your company’s endpoints, such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Microsoft 365 Defender is one of the best enterprise defense suites for organizations. It helps uncover security risks, investigate attacks, and stop risky activities. It can also automatically prevent attacks and self-heal mailboxes, endpoints, and user identities.

6. Take Advantage of a Threat and Vulnerability Management Tool

Set up a threat and vulnerability management tool to analyze your company’s security practices. Canadian businesses should contact a top IT consulting company in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, or any other major city to learn more about Microsoft 365 Secure Score.

In a nutshell, Microsoft 365 Secure Score evaluates your business’s security hygiene and delivers a report card of the overall cybersecurity performance. Not only does the system offer an overall rating, but also separate scores for passwords, access, device security, and applications.

With this data, you can isolate and improve cybersecurity weaknesses such as inadequate passwords.

Microsoft 365 Secure Score also allows you to compare your company’s score with similar companies to help you understand how your stance compares to your competitors.

While Microsoft Secure Score offers a great starting point, you’ll need professional help to beef up cybersecurity. Contact an IT services provider like Softlanding that works exclusively with Microsoft products to enhance your defenses seamlessly.

These are six tips that can help strengthen your password security. You can protect your login credentials with the right tools, practices, cybersecurity training, and professional IT services.