Philip Lieberman President Lieberman Software

IT security professionals are gambling with the security of their organizations by failing to update important service and process account passwords on a regular basis, with almost 15 percent admitting to either never updating passwords or only updating them annually, a survey from Lieberman Software Corporation revealed.
 
The company’s 2014 Information Security Survey which was carried out at a major global IT security event earlier this year, studied the attitudes of nearly 280 IT security professionals and also revealed that nine percent of organizations update their service and process account passwords on a six monthly basis, 53 percent update them on a quarterly basis, 21 percent update them on a monthly basis and only 1.5 percent update them on a daily basis.
 
In response to the findings, Philip Lieberman, noted cybersecurity expert and president of Lieberman Software, said, “As more and more security breaches are being uncovered, organizations should be taking a much more stringent approach at securing passwords. The defense and government industries, which are a very high target for cybercriminals, have come to realize that in order to improve security, passwords need to be changed on an hourly basis. If passwords only get updated on a monthly or quarterly basis, think about the damage a cybercriminal can do in that time -- one to three months of unlimited access into an organization’s critical systems? They could literally walk away with everything.”
 
In addition, half of the respondents of the survey who admitted to never updating service and process account passwords revealed that the reason for this was out of fear that changing passwords could potentially cause outages and downtime.
 
Commenting on these findings Lieberman said, “The organizations that choose not to update service and process account passwords because they are worried about causing outages, and believe the consequences of a cyber attack would be less severe than downtime, obviously do not understand how damaging a cyber attack can be and this points out a very worrying lack of awareness. The other respondents who admitted to never updating passwords, but didn’t cite network downtime as the reason, are playing with fire. Any organization that doesn’t update their service account passwords, or only updates them on an annual basis, quite frankly doesn’t understand the importance of these systems.”
 
The full survey report is available at: http://go.liebsoft.com/Information-Security-Survey-2014
 
About Lieberman Software Corporation

Lieberman Software provides award-winning privilege management products to more than 1200 enterprise customers worldwide, including nearly half of the Fortune 50. By automatically locating, securing and continuously auditing privileged identities, both on-premises and in the cloud, Lieberman Software helps protect access to systems with sensitive data, thereby reducing internal and external security vulnerabilities, improving IT productivity and helping ensure regulatory compliance. The company developed the first solution for the privilege management space, and its products, including Enterprise Random Password Manager (ERPM), continue to lead the market. Lieberman Software also provides a mature line of Windows security management tools. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with offices and channel partners located around the world.