Do your clients practice good password hygiene?

True or false: The leading cause of corporate cyber breaches is internal sources.

If you guessed true, then you’d be right. The biggest threat to your clients’ security is internal – in other words, the employees. More specifically, it’s employees, passwords, and poor password hygiene, which combine for a lack of password security in the workplace. What does this mean for MSPs? Opportunity.

Your clients are sharing passwords

Small businesses are one of the biggest targets for hackers, with 43% of all cyber attacks hitting small businesses. Password sharing is one of the biggest risks to your clients’ cyber security.

Sharing passwords greatly increases the chance of sensitive information getting released and cybercriminals attacking a company’s system. Despite this, the majority of employees (52%) don’t think sharing passwords is risky and an even larger amount of senior management (54%) think the same. In fact, many of the 65% of small and mid-sized businesses that have a password policy do not strictly enforce it. This further increases the chance that employees will share passwords and this exposes them to hacking, malicious malware, and ransomware attacks.

As well, despite dealing with a significant amount of sensitive information, only 15% of HR people believe employees are a top security concern. Most often, expert hackers get sensitive information by easily cracking weak passwords or getting others to hand them over without knowing it.

What your clients need

To reduce the need to share passwords, companies need to create a strong security culture that resonates throughout the entire organization. Employees need to be educated on why password sharing puts everyone at risk. To further enforce a no-password-sharing policy, restricted access to passwords must be enabled to other departments, devices, and workstations.

Minimizing downtime is an easy sell to the C-suite

Minimizing downtime due to hacking is a sure way to your clients’ hearts – if not the techs then definitely the C-suite. By providing even the most rudimentary of training on password hygiene, in combination with your backup and recovery, and in addition to the added layer of security on passwords provided by IT Glue, you’ll be maximizing client uptime.

IT Glue is the leading documentation platform for MSPs, designed to eliminate waste, improve productivity and hit your SLAs better. We are SOC 2 compliant, meaning that you can count on the security of your information in IT Glue.