When you use small business software to handle customer and corporate data, you need to think about security. In addition to selecting reliable vendors and keeping your anti-virus up to date, utilising sufficiently strong passwords can boost your protection, especially for cloud-based software and Web services.
Unfortunately, people tend to be pretty lax when it comes to creating passwords. Despite the prevalence of data breaches and cybercrime in the news, individuals still select codes that are far too simple or fail to change them often enough to keep their information resources safe.
In fact, password management firm SplashData recently revealed that the most common choice for 2014 was "123456," followed by "password". We could joke about the shocking lack of creativity in these examples, but it's actually something to be taken quite seriously. These passwords are extremely easy to guess in the first place, and their weakness only increases because they're so common.
"Passwords based on simple patterns on your keyboard remain popular despite how weak they are," said Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData.
"Any password using numbers alone should be avoided, especially sequences. As more websites require stronger passwords or combinations of letters and numbers, longer keyboard patterns are becoming common passwords, and they are still not secure."
For that reason, it might be a good time to revisit best practices for passwords and remind your employees who have accounts, such as for CashManager by Accomplish.
SplashData urged users to avoid selecting a favourite sport or team, a birthday or birth year, or simple names as passwords - these were all common trends within the list of the top 100 choices.
Generally, it's a good idea to use a good combination of capital and lower case letters, numbers and special characters like &, %, !, and #. Avoid simple words and predictable terms as much as possible. You should also change your passwords on a regular basis to boost your protection.