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Microsoft has just announced that a staggering 44 million accounts were vulnerable to account takeover due to the use of compromised or stolen passwords

Microsoft Highlights The Risk of Stolen Passwords

Microsoft has just announced that a staggering 44 million accounts were vulnerable to account takeover due to the use of compromised or stolen passwords. This news comes on the back of the recent Disney+ launch, where password reuse resulted in cybercriminals taking over user accounts.

There is mounting evidence that despite repeated warnings, users are still flying blind, and companies are not taking enough action to prevent the use of exposed credentials, putting users’ data at risk.

Why are compromised passwords a problem?

People’s desire for convenience drives then to use the same login details for multiple accounts. To put this in context, research from Google found that 65% of people reuse the same password for all or most of their accounts with another study finding that 62% of employees use the same password for their personal and work accounts.

A cybercriminal can simply obtain a password from a breach on one site, and then because of this password reuse, use that password to access that user’s accounts on other websites and systems. A study from Virginia Tech University found that 70% of users deployed an exposed password for different accounts up to a year after a leak. Even worse, 40% of people are reusing passwords, which were leaked over three years ago.

Companies and organizations must take action now

As cybercriminals become increasingly sophisticated, organizations must take steps to protect themselves and their users rather than hoping people will suddenly stop reusing passwords!

NIST password recommendations outline how organizations should verify that passwords are not compromised before they are activated and monitor those passwords on an ongoing basis. By checking passwords against a database of exposed or stolen passwords, organizations can significantly reduce the prevalence of compromised and stolen passwords. As the number of data breaches and compromised credentials expands continuously, checking passwords against a dynamic database rather than a static list is critical.

If a compromise is detected, it’s vital to institute an immediate, automated action. Automation allows organizations to customize the action such as a password reset to secure the account before additional damages can occur, or a prompt to the user to create a new password the next time they log in.

As we enter the next decade, companies must take action to protect themselves and ensure stolen passwords for their users aren’t putting their accounts at risk. At Enzoic, we provide a range of automated solutions that stop compromised logins or passwords from being used to activate accounts for users, customers, and employees. And, equally important, our products continuously screen to ensure that existing credentials have not been compromised.

Enzoic’s Active Directory tool would detect many of the exposed or stolen passwords in the 44 million accounts. It runs quietly in the background and only impacts users that are using bad, compromised, or stolen passwords.

It’s time for organizations to make a new year’s resolution to banish compromised credentials once and for all!

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This site is for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Your password will be sent securely to the Enzoic servers to check if it is compromised. We do not store your password or use it for any other purpose. If you are not comfortable with this, do not enter your real password.
What is this?

Password Check is a free tool that lets you determine not just the strength of a password (how complex it is), but also whether it is known to be compromised. Billions of user passwords have been exposed by hackers on the web and dark web over the years and as a result they are no longer safe to use. So even if your password is very long and complex, and thus very strong, it may still be a bad choice if it appears on this list of compromised passwords. This is what the Password Check tool was designed to tell you and why it is superior to traditional password strength estimators you may find elsewhere on the web.

Why is it needed?

If you are using one of these compromised passwords, it puts you at additional risk, especially if you are using the same password on every site you visit. Cybercriminals rely on the fact that most people reuse the same login credentials on multiple sites.

Why is this secure?

This page, and indeed our entire business, exists to help make passwords more secure, not less. While no Internet-connected system can be guaranteed to be impregnable, we keep the risks to an absolute minimum and firmly believe that the risk of unknowingly using compromised passwords is far greater. Since our database of compromised passwords is far larger than what could be downloaded to the browser, the compromised password check we perform must occur server-side. Thus, it is necessary for us to submit a hashed version of your password to our server. To protect this data from eavesdropping, it is submitted over an SSL connection. The data we pass to our server consists of three unsalted hashes of your password, using the MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 algorithms. While unsalted hashes, especially ones using MD5 and SHA1, are NOT a secure way to store passwords, in this case that isn’t their purpose – SSL is securing the transmitted content, not the hashes. Many of the passwords we find on the web are not plaintext; they are unsalted hashes of the passwords. Since we’re not in the business of cracking password hashes, we need these hashes submitted for more comprehensive lookups. We do not store any of the submitted data. It is not persisted in log files and is kept in memory only long enough to perform the lookup, after which the memory is zeroed out. Our server-side infrastructure is hardened against infiltration using industry standard tools and techniques and is routinely tested and reviewed for soundness.

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