In honor of World Password Day on May 6, Becker's Hospital Review is compiling tips and insights to make your passwords and your staff's passwords strong.
Ten tips and insights for hospital leaders:
- The FBI said that simple passwords, even those with special characters, are easy for a cyberattacker to figure out.
- The FBI suggests that instead of using short and complex passwords, to use long passwords that combine multiple words. The FBI gave the example "TechTuesday2021Strenghten!"
- The FBI suggests that your email, financial and health accounts have unique passwords and that they are as long as your system will allow.
- Always set up multifactor authentication on your accounts when it is offered and do not allow password hints.
- The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommend that healthcare leaders should regularly review the organization's password management program.
- A hospital's IT support team should set standard operating procedures for password resets of user account lockouts.
- Researchers found that the most common password for healthcare employees is "123456."
- Aside from sequential numbers, the two most common passwords from employees worldwide are "qwerty" and "password."
- In a survey, 44 percent of respondents said they reuse passwords between work and personal accounts.
- Fifty-seven percent of survey respondents said they save their passwords on sticky notes.