Staying safe online starts with the individual 

Robin Martin at LastPass shares some tips about how to keep cyber safe online

 

Individuals are using more and more devices and digital platforms to store personal and private information given more than 60% of the world’s population is now online. Consumers and businesses are often not educated enough to fully understand the risks that come with these online environments.

 

However, sometimes we know our habits are wrong. Yet, we continue to do it anyway. When it comes to passwords, why is it so hard for individuals and businesses to shake off all their bad habits? 

 

We know what we should do, but we still don’t do it. Most of us understand the risks involved with reusing and forgetting passwords, they are a hacker’s golden key into your private accounts. So, how can you make simple password hygiene part and parcel of your daily routine?  

 

Keep it to yourself 

A common practice nowadays that reduces our online security by making hackers’ job all too easy is sharing passwords freely between friends and family across multiple accounts. To get a grasp of the potential extent of the danger, there is a simple rule of thumb that equates the number of accounts where the same password is used with the overall risk of exposure.

 

Put simply, it means that a single security incident can become a major breach with a host of accounts being compromised, with potentially devastating consequences for individuals and businesses alike.  ​ 

 

Action should not be taken solely when our online security is put in active danger, especially given the heightened threat levels, because prevention is always better than the cure. For those who have been lucky enough to evade the hackers’ best efforts, it’s time to shed any complacency and get the ball rolling on simple and effective approaches, allowing us to get on with our jobs and personal online browsing safely and securely. ​ 

 

Early habits live long 

Like many things in life, the trick to nurturing strong cyber behaviours starts with education. From a young age, we should be instilling a good understanding of the importance of cyber security and laying the foundations of positive behaviours to help build habits that will last a lifetime.  

 

But for those who are stuck in their ways of long-term poor password behaviour, how can there be a complete shift in mindset? Scaremongering is certainly not the tactic to use, but it’s important to keep the eyes firmly fixed on the consequences of poor security posture. 

 

There needs to be a change in modern society’s outdated mindset of shaming people about their poor cyber security hygiene. The shift of mindsets needs to be from one where responsibility is with one person or an IT team, to each individual taking ownership of cyber security towards part of an established process of adopting a healthy and robust cyber security culture.  

 

Use tools to your advantage 

In commercial settings, it should never be any one person’s job to shoulder the responsibility for an entire organisation. Creating new risk-aware and security-focused cultures should be top of organisations’ to-do lists.

 

The onus is on businesses to lead in this area by showing teams the value of positive cyber security habits. As part of this process, there need to be personal and business-wide incentives that ensure that change is brought strategically and structurally. 

 

On both business and consumer levels it’s vital to highlight the benefits of using cutting-edge password manager functionality. These now offer an enhanced user experience that has become very user-friendly and light touch. 

 

The best-of-breed password managers feature technologies including biometrics, SSO and federated identity, enabling users to log in to devices and applications without the need to type in a password. Comprehensive password managers also streamline the user experience, while still maintaining a high level of security and complete control for IT and security teams. This improves overall cyber security for individuals and staff within businesses while streamlining the experience for all – a combined win-win situation. ​ 

 

The proliferation and expansion of online environments are showing no signs of slowing down. However, we need to ensure the education of good password hygiene practices to promote cyber security from individual to organisational level.

 

Data protection, when paired with human behavioural change, is how we can keep hackers, cyber crime and personal losses at bay.  

 

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Robin Martin is VP of EMEA Sales at LastPass 

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com