Addiction or Prevention

In today’s technology age, there are creeping addictions that many have but few acknowledge. The worst pandemic of which we suffer today may actually be an addiction to passwords as the primary security perimeter to our cyber assets. Think about it for a second. How many passwords do you need on a daily basis just to get your work done?

Password addictions

While there has literally been millions of books, blogs and articles written on the subject of addition to everything from alcohol to drugs and gambling to sex, there has been little to nothing written on a far more prevalent addiction. The addiction to passwords has been fostered, nurtured and strengthened by pretty much every programmer worldwide since the dawn of computing.

Password addiction is so prevalent that we have now declared a special recognition just for it. Specifically, Matt Buchanan at Gizmodo has dubbed “February 1 Is Change Your Password Day” and wrote:

“Anyways, I thought it would be a good idea if we all changed our passwords together. Like positive peer pressure, 'cause it's pretty goddamn annoying. Sooner is better than later, so I was thinking maybe we should all change our passwords on February 1. I'm not very creative, so I've decided to just call it ‘Change Your Password Day.’”

You know we collectively have a problem, when a respected journalist has to remind the world to change their password at least once per year to somewhat protect from cyber maliciousness.

Cyber Threat Prevention

We’ve written on the need to “Focus On Prevention Not Protection” in the past, but it bears a reminding of certain lessons. We all know that the best defense is a great offense and, in the war against cybercrime, the best offense includes:

1. A malware detection and prevention solution that can block malicious code from even entering your organization.
2. A solution that quarantines anything that does slip through the cracks.
3. An employee training regime that helps ensure your people are not a security liability but in fact a cybersecurity asset.

Setting a Higher Cyber Prevention Bar

Instead of relying on password resets, it is incumbent on IT security professionals to enable true cyber threat prevention protocols and technologies. Leverage solutions that use deep inspection and analysis methods that interpret and detect code in real time in order to immediately block threats from affecting your organization.

Your selected solutions should make no assumptions on threat heuristics and behavior but actually assume that there is no legitimate reason for executable code to be present in a data file, it relies solely on identifying code existence on non-executables files. In this way you can be assured that inappropriate code will not enter your IT infrastructure through the inappropriate use of old passwords.

See for yourself what Mimecast can do to deliver evasion proof security for your organization today so that you can protect your corner of the world. Register for a demo today.