Virtually Half of Former Workers Say Their Passwords Nonetheless Work

An alarming variety of organizations will not be correctly offboarding workers after they depart, particularly in regard to passwords. In a March PasswordManager.com survey of 1,000 U.S. employees who had entry to firm passwords at their earlier jobs, 47% admitted to utilizing them after leaving the corporate.

Safety groups needs to be terminating entry to all worker accounts, equivalent to e-mail, cloud purposes, and inner instruments, after workers depart. For accounts or companies the place a number of workers share passwords, these passwords needs to be rotated to make sure that the previous workers now not have entry.

In keeping with the survey, 58% of respondents indicated they have been nonetheless ready to make use of their former firm’s passwords after they left. One in three respondents mentioned that they had been utilizing the passwords for upwards of two years, which is a distressingly very long time for organizations not to pay attention to who’s accessing these accounts and companies.

“Ideally the corporate creates customary working procedures or constant schedules of updating passwords primarily based on criticality,” says Daniel Farber Huang, head of privateness and cybersecurity at PasswordManager.com.

When requested what they use the passwords for, 64% mentioned to entry their former e-mail accounts and 44% to entry firm information. Although nearly all of the respondents, 56%, mentioned they have been accessing the accounts for private use, a regarding 10% mentioned they have been making an attempt to disrupt firm actions.

A survey from Past Identification in 2022 had comparable findings: Fifty-three % of worker respondents admitted to using their access to harm their former employers, and 74% of enterprise leaders reported struggling damages from former workers who exploited their digital entry.