Improve Your Password Security With Keepass

Today May 7th is Password day! This is to raise your awareness regarding your password security. Everyone is aware of what could happen if you have a weak password and password security. It’s in the end the usual fight between security and convenience. Sure it can be annoying to change passwords every 3 months, come up with a decent one and remember it.

Here at Jan IT we have to deal with a lot of passwords. Many can’t keep track of all them. So that’s one IT admin service we do for our clients. That way you can get rid of the common seven sins of passwords:

• Use same passwords for everyone and everything (convenience just flattened any attempt of security)
• Use a password that isn’t a password like P@ssw0rd (very genuine and no dictionary attack would ever guess that… #sarcasm)
• Administrate passwords in Excel (because no one would ever try to get the hands on a file calls “passwords”)
• Smarter, write them down on paper and hang them around in the office. TV5 Monde got “hacked” by releasing a nice picture of their office part of an interview. In the background was a nice piece of paper good readable with the login and the purpose of the account.
• Hiding passwords under the keyboard isn’t smarter either. That’s one of the few places social engineers keep looking.
• Never reset passwords. Pro: remember one password. Con: At one point they pry the account open with enough tries and get in everywhere. If you haven’t locked down login attempts on your server and IP addresses which can access your server, you should do so. Our IT Support Service can do this for you!
• Keeping track of accounts and passwords in the first place. Sure it’s safe because no one knows that it even exists in the first place. But personally I doubt if this account has any use at all then. Password recovery is another “fun activity” no one really likes to do.

How do we secure your passwords?

So how do we do it? We’re using a nice tool called KeePass. Each customer has an own keepass database which is well encrypted. So even someone manages it to get their hands on it, they will spend some time. In this time we can easily reset every single password in it (even manually if we have to).

This tool allows you to store every kind of password and login access detail in any kind of structure you need (passwords, access keys, you have really a lot of options). It comes with a nice search function so you can find them quickly and best of all an auto-type function. So even key logger which record every key stroke on your computer have hard time.

So compared to, manually typing and maybe copy&pasting from your excel file all the passwords in a insecure fashion. You cut down your login flow to:

1. Login to your keepass database (means you need to remember only one high complex password you need to keep track of)
2. Lookup your password and let it go to the login page
3. Let it type in the password for you (it comes with a nice password generator, so having a 20 character long password with all sorts of characters is no issue anymore)

That’s it. You can store thousands of logins and keep a proper history of your passwords.

If we administrate your IT infrastructure, then this is one of the best practice ways we keep your business safe. No sheets of paper or excel files floating around in our office. Also if you don’t keep track of passwords, we do this for you. Another well received concierge IT service so our clients have more time to do their business instead of running after the little pieces.

Need more information about KeePass or a quick start guide on how to use for yourself? Let us know down in the comments. We’re happy to help you!