Sharing your password, even with someone you trust, is more dangerous than you might think. Even if you're not guilty of this crime, you might be surprised to learn that SurveyMonkey conducted a survey and found that 34% of people readily share their passwords with co-workers.
These are accounts whose users change every day. Moreover, according to a report, people between the ages of 25 and 34 create an average of forty accounts with a single email address. One person was using only 5 different passwords for these 40 accounts. That means only 5 different passwords for 40 accounts!!
Now, it won't be difficult to know how dangerous it can be to be in such situation. But what are the five biggest pitfalls of password sharing?
Today we will tell you what are the five risks of sharing your password with your friends or your colleagues:
1. You Potentially Lose Ownership Of Your Account
When you give someone the password to one of your accounts, that means you're giving access to other accounts also that have the same password.
If one of those passwords happens to be the password for one of your social media accounts, it's possible that a disgruntled friend or co-worker will log into your account and make changes to your account that you don't like.
And even worse is when one of the passwords belongs to your email account. Because an email account is an important tool for resetting your password.
If a hacker gains access to your email account, they can delete all of your personal and identifiable information, such as your address and phone number. This information can also be replaced by hackers with the information of their choosing.۔
Not only does this allow hackers to make purchases on sites like Amazon with your money, but they can also spoof the product's shipping address and receive the products. What you think is just an email account password can be so important!
Sharing a password means that the person you gave the password to has cut you out of your own digital life, and has owned your identity.
2. Hacking And Phishing
At home or at work, whenever you type your name and password on your computer, you usually don't notice someone looking over your shoulder. This is because you usually have confidence in your computer's security. Or you don't worry too much because you have good antivirus software installed on your system.
Naturally, you probably take precautions to protect your password. But unfortunately, your colleagues (with whom you share passwords) may not be as serious about their password security as you. No one can guarantee that there is no hidden software (spyware) running on their system.
If your colleagues have been found guilty of negligence in the past, there may be keylogging software running on their systems that collects their login details, or if they are still negligent, it's quite possible that a suspicious email from a dubious website landed on their system, and since you shared a password with them, you're also vulnerable to a phishing attack.
Furthermore, if your colleague's computer is not secure (i.e. no security software is running on it), and he saves your password on his computer, is it possible that no one else in the office will see your password? Of course, there are countless risks involved.
The truth is that when you give your username and password to one of your colleagues, even if you have security software or antivirus installed on your system, your computer can still be hacked through another colleague's computer.
3. The Butterfly Effect
According to Verizon, at the enterprise level, 81% of hacking-related activities are caused by weak or stolen passwords. The thing to understand here is that if hackers gain access to one part of your computer, it becomes possible for them to gain access to other parts of the network.
Sharing a password over a message to a colleague can lead to the leakage of confidential customer information, which can also pose legal problems for the company. If this actually happens, your role in the company will be questioned.
Even if you give someone your office's Wi-Fi password, it means that you have increased the risk of attacks like DNS Hijacking or Man-in-the-Middle. Even if the service you're giving someone access to doesn't seem that important, you should consider it important as an entry point into the network.
4. The Unwanted Breaches Of Privacy
Sometimes a situation may arise where it was your responsibility to respond to comments on the company's YouTube channel, but you have given your colleague the responsibility to help you out. In such a case, it is quite possible that you have to give your colleague access to your Google account.
Now that a service like Google keeps recording your browsing history, it will be possible for your colleague to know what videos you have watched, what sites you have visited on your browser. It will even be possible for him to know which documents, videos or photos you have saved on your Google account's Drive.
In the times of working from home, when corporate accounts are often used on mobile phones, personal laptops and home devices, not only do you risk an invasion of privacy, but worse, you are vulnerable to blackmail. Sensitive media from your personal computer can be exposed and even leaked onto the web.
5. Decrease In Productivity
If you're more of a cyber security savvy than a typical computer user, but your company requires you to frequently share your passwords with your colleagues, then you may be want to know if your colleague's computer has a virus, or if you want to keep an eye on your password when they start using it, or even, you want to change your password twice.
The first time is so that your colleague does not know that the password he is using is the same as the passwords of your other accounts. The second time is so that when your colleague stops using your account, you can take back control of your account by logging them out.
The problem with all of this is that when passwords have to be changed more often, and thus workers have to spend valuable time repeatedly changing and securing their passwords, their productivity suffers and important work gets left behind.
This situation gets worse when time is an asset and is constantly being wasted, the company revenue also starts to fall.
Read More:
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