World Password Day is a celebration to promote better password habits. Passwords are critical gatekeepers to our digital identities, allowing us to access online shopping, dating, banking, social media, private work and life communications. World Password Day is being celibrated a few years now, and aims at raising awareness of the importance of choosing good passwords for your online accounts.
History
Security researcher Mark Burnett first encouraged people to have a “password day,” where they update important passwords in his 2005 book Perfect Passwords. Inspired by his idea, Intel Security took the initiative to declare the first Thursday in May World Password Day in May 2013.
What is World Password Day?
Given the rapid rise in identity theft and the development of hacking tools, it’s surprising just how common bad passwords still are. Many people still use ‘123456’, their date of birth , ‘qwerty’ / ‘azerty’, or even ‘password’ to log into their social media accounts, their professional e-mail box or (even worse) their online banking services.
World Password Day was created to address this problem.
World Password Day is the only time of the year when the importance of strong passwords is mentioned in the media, and is very important for people who don’t think about IT security everyday.
Every World Password Day, plenty of resources on choosing strong passwords appear. Though most of us know the basics of how to choose good, secure passwords, it can’t hurt to take a refresher course every now and again.
How to observe?
You can celebrate World Password Day by visiting PasswordDay.org and taking the #WorldPasswordDay pledge, sharing a password tip on social media, changing an old password to a long, strong one or by turning on two-factor authentication for your important accounts.
You can find some useful tips about creating strong passwords by clicking on the following link :
https://www.purevpn.com/blog/password-security-scty/
Data protection and password policies
The GDPR requires that any data controller or processor must adopt the necessary technical and organisational measures in order to guarantee that any personal data (data related to an identified or identifiable person) they may process is secure. Such measures help to avoid data breaches.
Adopting a password policy within your firm or organisation which explains and sets the rules for your employees on how to make strong passwords, how often to change them, where to store passwords , etc….is often a required organisational measure. We also advice you to look with great attention to the rise of biometric security, from fingerprint to voice protection.
