Overview

Making sure authorized users have access to either sensitive company information or their personal e-mail can be a daunting task, given the fact that an average user has to remember at least 4/5 passwords, a couple of which have to be changed on a monthly basis. The majority of users are frustrated when choosing or remembering a password, and are highly unaware of the consequences of their actions while handling accounting data.

This article will provide you with an overview of how important, yet fragile, passwords security really is; you will be acquainted with different techniques for creating and maintaining passwords, and possible alternative methods for authentication, namely passphrases, Biometrics and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Dangers posed by passwords

While the majority of organizations and almost 99% of the home users still rely heavily on passwords as a basic form of authentication to sensitive and personal resources, the insecure maintenance, creation, and network transfer could open the front door of any organization or personal asset to a malicious attacker.


Management staff with outdated mode of thinking still believe that passwords are the most essential, user-friendly way to identify a user on their network or database, while the fact is that users are frustrated with the fact that they need to change their password, that they need to create a "secure" password, or follow instructions on how to keep it as secret as possible. The results are a large number of crackable passwords, the same passwords on multiple systems, and "post it" notes with passwords even including login names.

On any given system, certain users have privileges that the others don't and shouldn’t even have. By identifying yourself on your computer or any given web site, you are granted with access to your work environment and personal data, data which you define as sensitive and data you wouldn't want to make public, the way a company doesn't want to give a competitor an access to its intranet, for instance. Abusive scenarios posed by exposing accounting data are:

- Identity theft

Identity theft might occur once your accounting data is somehow known to another person using it to impersonate you in order to get hold of you digital identity. This might result in both financial damages, as well as personal ones.

- Sensitive data exposure

The content of your e-mail correspondence, personal projects, documents and photos, could be exposed to a malicious hacker or someone targeting especially you as an individual.

- Company data exposure

Unethical intelligence by getting sensitive confidential internal information through a badly maintained and kept accounting data would have an enormous impact on the company you're working for. I doubt you would like to be the one who exposed the next 6 months' marketing and advertising plans to a competitor.