May 4th is World Password Day – a good opportunity for organisations to assess how they’re protecting some of their most overlooked accounts: social media
When business leaders consider the role of password security in preventing data breaches, they naturally focus their attention on the most obvious weak points, such as employee email accounts and network passwords. However, social media passwords pose unique security issues that companies are sometimes ill-prepared to address. Whether due to an internal policy or if social media is outsourced to a third party agency, this lack of password security could be putting organisations and their reputations at risk.
Ways organisations expose their social media passwords
The lack of centralised, secure social media password management leaves businesses vulnerable to cyberthreats. In social media agencies, for example, unnecessary risks could start as early as the customer onboarding process when clients insecurely share their social media passwords with their agency through unencrypted emails or messages.
Another common mistake is that passwords are regularly stored in a spreadsheet or text file which creates a single point of failure. If this document is compromised, all accounts are compromised. Similarly, if the same password is used for multiple social media accounts, which is often the case, cybercriminals can more easily access other accounts if one is compromised.
Using weak passwords, or ones that have already been compromised as part of a public data breach, leaves accounts vulnerable to credential-stuffing and password spraying attacks. Oftentimes, social media teams will be completely unaware unless they have measures in place to alert them to any weak or compromised passwords that are available on the dark web.
Securing corporate social media passwords
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