Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, the daily podcast from the ZDNet.fr editorial staff. My name is Guillaume Serries and today I explain to you why we always use the same passwords, even when they’ve been stolen.
Password headaches remain a huge problem for large enterprises, medium enterprises, small businesses, and individuals.
We must create them, with ever more selective criteria, preserve them, change them, find new ones. And more and more frequently with more and more services online and elsewhere. And you, like me, we choose the easy way out. Even if you know that your password has been stolen, and can be used to steal your identity, you continue to use it as long as you are not prevented from doing so. Worse, you still use the same expired password to access multiple sites.
Two new trends that could improve the situation
SpyCloud, a security company, points out in a new study that 64% of us use the same password, a password that has already been stolen. These reused passwords are a huge security issue. Because if a password has been compromised once, hackers can use it to access other accounts if it was used as an identifier for another site.
Finally, people choose bad passwords over and over again. “123456”, “azerty”, “admin” or even “password” are still used passwords, ensures SpyCloud.
Faced with this completely deleterious attitude, the study mentions two new trends that could improve the situation.
The observation is simple: people now have so many online accounts that they no longer remember the correct passwords.
So a growing portion of the population is using password managers, like LastPass and Dashlane. These password managers store manage all of the user’s passwords.
The second trend is the increasing use of multi-factor authentication – known as MFA. How does the AMF work? To connect to a service, you must not only enter a password, but above all enter a second code, often a temporary PIN code, received from another device, such as a smartphone. It is tools like Okta for example, which offer this type of solution.
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