Do you use the same password for anything that you used a decade ago? Some of you reading this will have certainly raised their hands. We have been over the benefits of secure passwords multiple times but it is also a good idea to change passwords every so often. Do you do that? Probably not and you are not alone. Well you should, especially if you are using the same password that you have used for years.
Collection #1
A trove of information was recently discovered by a cyber security researcher. 87 gigabytes of personal information containing almost 773 million email addresses and over 21 million passwords were included and dubbed Collection #1. This information appeared to have been stockpiled over the course of over a decade and much of this comes from information from data breaches.
This number of email addresses is a huge number. It is estimated that there are approximately 3.8 billion email addresses world wide. That is potentially 1 out of 5 email addresses that have been logged. Considering how many people use insecure passwords breaking into these accounts would be easy, especially for a botnet to do.
Do you regularly change your password?
Again, we have been over the benefits of secure passwords multiple times but another measure of security should be changing the password. How often should you change the password? Every 30 days. That may seem to be incredibly inconvenient since you may have to reenter the password across multiple devices and that is true. Of course a password manager can be used to help mitigate that.
If you change your password regularly, even if it is every 60 days or 90 days that would mean that if someone has your old password and is using it to spy on you or who knows what else, they would no longer have access to the account. You will be able to sleep much better at night. At the same time the inconvenience of changing passwords is nothing compared to the inconvenience that will come following a data breach.
Don’t get us wrong, changing your passwords regularly is probably the last thing that you are thinking about and you are busy working or running your business. It is something to think about though going forward and it is certainly an appropriate security precaution. Do you want to gamble that someone knows your username and password and could jeopardize your business? You shouldn’t.