With everything going on in Canberra (again!) this week, it’s easy to become distracted from the real news – namely that a security audit found 1,464 WA government employees used ‘Password123’ as their password.
In total, 26 per cent of WA public servants were using weak passwords – about 60,000 out of 234,000 accounts with ‘Password123’, ‘Project10’, ‘support’ and ‘password1’ the most common.
In one case, the auditors were able to access an agency’s whole network by guessing the password: ‘Summer123’. They also found that some employees were saving their password in Word documents or spreadsheets, leaving their computers readily available to hackers.
Understandably, the Auditor General was unimpressed. “After repeatedly raising password risks with agencies, it is unacceptable that people are still using password123 and abcd1234 to access critical agency systems and information,” Caroline Spencer told WA Today (well duh).
The state Government’s now promised to up its security game with a brand new Office of Digital Government complete with its own cyber security team.
First order of business: don’t use the word ‘password’!
Discussion1 Comment
Interesting article. Love that the lack of a strong password is about people and not related to IT systems. With many companies, they rate the password and can prevent this from happening by ensuring that those types of passwords are not permitted and meet certain criteria. I guess Biometrics will take over eventually. Like the Apple Advert – “what is your banking password” 🙂