This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s probably anything but to many members of your team. According to a 2015 survey conducted by TeleSign, close to 75% of consumers use duplicate passwords in their online activity.
Twenty-one percent of them use passwords more than a decade old, 47% have been using the same password for five years and a whopping 54% use the same five passwords across an entire lifetime online.
As a practice manager or director, these numbers shouldn’t just make you chuckle – they should make you mad. It may be that the entirety of your firm’s data, everything you’ve worked so hard to build over years of blood, sweat and tears, could be guarded behind a password as simple as “123456.”
Make sure you train your employees on safe password practices. That means mandatory password changes to key practice accounts every few months, each of them containing letters, numbers and symbols, preferably without any real words at all. It’s a small change, but it can drastically increase your odds against data breaches.