Use password best practices in your organization
Weak or reused passwords are the cause of 80% of data breaches worldwide. The dark web, past data breaches and other illicit sources provide cybercriminals with a continual source of passwords — and hardware specifically dedicated to cracking passwords is becoming more powerful and efficient every year.
But passwords are the primary way most organizations authenticate users, so what steps can you take to reduce risk?
Next steps
• Implement password filtering for your Windows domain: This allows your organization to implement a blacklist to prevent weak and easily guessable elements such as seasons, years, months and sports teams from being included in your users’ passwords. Passwords can also be checked against lists of breached passwords. Many can be configured to allow decreased complexity with an increase in length, automatically encouraging employees to choose better passwords.
• Use password best practices: Increase your password length requirement to at least 14 characters and encourage the use of passphrases rather than passwords. Better yet, implement a password manager.
• Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA): Use MFA wherever possible to keep any single password from becoming the weak link in your authentication chain.
SOURCE: WIPFLI