| Your IT staff is tired of pulling their hair out trying to convince you to use complex passwords!! Why MFA needs to be implemented!
 Written by: Kathy Glahn, VP of Operations & Information Systems at Big I New York
Passwords these days need to keep getting longer and more complex. The new standard is to have a password length of at least 13 characters comprised of letters, numbers and special characters. Passwords should never contain personal information, such as your address, phone number, date of birth, wedding/divorce anniversaries (yes, some of us do celebrate divorces!), family names or pet names. They should also never contain information you included on one of those Facebook surveys.... you know the ones.... What is your favorite food, travel destination, etc.
Did you know that passwords are now very easy to crack?
 Source: https://www.hivesystems.io/blog/are-your-passwords-in-the-green
Hive systems has published a chart that indicates that ChatGPT hardware can brute force a 12-character password with numbers, letters, and symbols in 8 months. An 8-character complex password takes less than 1 second to crack. How scary is that?
So how can you create a secure login without needing to implement a 25-character password? Also, don't forget that passwords need to be un!que (see what I did there?), complex, and you should never use the same password on multiple websites. The answer is MFA!
It is important for everyone to implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for personal and business purposes. MFA requires more than one way to authenticate who you are when logging into software or a website. It is extremely important to implement MFA on any website or software that contains personal information. MFA needs to be implemented on your agency management system, email, company website, banking sites (personal and business), benefits websites, etc. You can help your employees safeguard your business data and their own personal data by introducing MFA in your agency. MFA is not hard to implement. Each software is a little different on how to implement, but usually comes down to checking a box indicating that you want to implement MFA. The next step is usually downloading authenticator software on your phone or entering an email address of phone number.
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