Slacking on Security

Information security solution vendor Cyber-Ark (Dedham, Mass.) reports that passwords with administrator-level permissions are too common at most firms, creating security loopholes. According to a survey of more than 140 IT pros (33 percent from financial services firms), half of the respondents say their organizations have more privileged passwords than individual passwords.

More alarming, due to the time-consuming nature of changing passwords, privileged passwords rarely are changed. While 99 percent of individual passwords are changed regularly, administrative passwords remain constant much of the time on servers (13 percent), routers (12 percent), local workstations (21 percent) and software (42 percent)