By Sarah Evans 
During social distancing and self isolation, one thing is for certain, it has allowed more time to catch up on all the things “we never have time for.” The majority of the business “refresh and upkeep” time is spent doing administrative things, like updating contacts, rewriting and editing old copy and FAQ guides and, of course, updating passwords (although you can use a password manager app to help with this) and more.
As I manually updated some passwords that hadn’t been updated in a while and also integrated a password generator for others, it had me wondering about the origin story of passwords.
(The moral of this story is to take downtime right now and update your passwords.)
In the late 70’s Robert Morris said the only way to truly have computer security were to, “do not own a computer, do not power it on and do not use it.”
Things have come a long way since then, but online security, or cybersecurity, mostly due to keeping up with online hackers.
Some of the most common ways people get hacked, include:
- Compromised passwords (easy to guess)
- Missing security updates (two-factor authentication)
- Insecure themes and plugins (hackers add malicious code to free versions of things)
- Data leaks (when corporate data is mishandled)
Enter password management apps. While less than a quarter of Americans use one, it’s something to think about using if you store a lot of data online (which most of us do).
A few to consider:
The number one tip to making your account more secure? Don’t reuse the same password — especially on your social channels (of which you should have two-factor authentication turned on).
So, what’s the future of passwords? Over time, we will see the elimination of passwords with technology, like certificate-based authentication. It’s not a new term or technology and uses “public key cryptography” to at a basic level to look at your digital signature and confirm that a site is trusted.
To completely eliminate using passwords overall, there are tools, like Beyond Identity (who created the infographic below) and others in the certificate-based authentication space.
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