If you have been following the news, you may have heard how last week Zappos (an online shoe retailer owned by Amazon) was breached forcing them to reset 2.4 million passwords for their users as hackers were able to get them all. The CEO did a great job and acted swiftly to disclose what was going on.
The twist is this story is that shortly after, a class action lawsuit has been filed against Amazon stating they violated a part of the Fair Credit Reporting Act by failing to properly encrypt and secure customer information, and seeks unspecified damages for 24 million customers. This is interesting. It may set a new precedence. Do we have an obligation as netizens to hold cloud providers to a high standard by sueing them for negligence? Does this help or hinder online application vendors and online store fronts?
At this point, it doesn't matter. Although there are debates about the negligence in protecting the customer data, the reality is passwords need to be highly secured. There should be no need to reset everyone's password because a single server was compromised. The keys to protecting them should be isolated and separated.
And we should be managing passwords and sensitive keys more effectively. Both on and off servers. Both on premise at work, and in the cloud. And that is something we are going to help our customers do better going forward.
Next week we will be announcing the general availability of the AuthAnvil Password Vault. The Password Vault allows you to centrally organize, share, synchronize and audit all your important passwords within your organization, and the organizations you may work with. Access your passwords securely from almost anywhere on almost any device, both on-premise and in the cloud. All protected with AuthAnvil Two Factor Auth.
At this point, no one knows if Amazon will lose this case. However, the point has already been made. Neglecting password management can expose businesses to great liability. If you work within an IT Service Provider or IT department, what are you doing to make sure you have reduced that risk to an acceptable level? Do you even know where to start?
Next week, we'll show you how.
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