Don’t Use The Same Password

Don’t use the same password should be your company’s mantra on creating safe access to each account.

On May 7 of this year Colonial Pipeline based in Houston, Texas, suffered a ransomware attack that crippled its operations. Colonial Pipeline is an American oil pipeline company. Their system is the largest fuel pipeline in the US. They paid a ransom of 4.4 million dollars in Bitcoin within several hours of the attack.

The way that hackers were able to gain entry to Colonial Pipelines systems was through a single compromised password.
Cybersecurity consultants found that on April 29 a virtual private network (VPN) account was the means by which the hackers accessed the companies network.

This VPN was no longer in use. However, it had not been deactivated and the account’s password was discovered in a batch of leaked passwords on the dark web. This would mean that a Colonial employee would have used that same password on another account that was previously hacked.

Password manager

This shows how important it is to not use the same password for multiple accounts.
It takes one breach of a site that uses that password, and your company or private data is exposed.

So how do you remember all of those passwords?
Is having different passwords for every service that you access just too hard to manage?
The answer is a password manager.

And remember, don’t use the same password.