# 10 Billion Reasons Shared Passwords Are Bad: RockYou2024

- Link: https://www.agilicus.com/10-billion-reasons-shared-passwords-are-bad-rockyou2024/
- Published: 2024-07-08T14:39:00+00:00
- Author: Don Bowman

Another day another piece of dismal cyber security news (well, dismal for team blue),
RockYou2024 dumps 10 Billion passwords. This is in turn an amalgamation of earlier
leaks and some new material, and, is the source of all those “We scan the dark web
for you” services that you are considering investing in.

I know, all your systems use salted, hashed passwords (or better, passkeys and single-
sign-on openid connect). But, this type of dump is used in a different way, a stuffing
attack. Highly patient robots type the passwords one by one until they get a hit.
And, systems without multi-factor authentication eventually get caught.

Compounding the problem is ‘shared password’ systems. These, often shadow-IT, systems
are used by multiple people who for some reason don’t have unique accounts. Examples
are TeamViewer, Jump box VPN’s, etc. By making it hard for them to sign in with 
their native single-sign-on, and being intrinsically team-oriented, the natural 
approach humans come up with is a ‘shared password’. Its strong, after all, we trust
each other, right?

But all it takes is for one of those people to use that one shared password in one-
more system, and there is a dramatic reduction in strength. And, of course, who 
wouldn’t do that, after all, its shared, not secret, why should you remember more
of them?

To add to the misery pile, the services you subscribe to that check your core systems
against being in these breaches, indeed they check the core systems. They run through
the breaches and see if your users are using those passwords in your Microsoft Active
Directory, or Google Workspace. But what they don’t check is those tools that sit
on the periphery. TeamViewer. VPN to the jump box. etc.

Now, let me let you in on a secret. There is a simple solution to this. One that
doesn’t change how you do business or how your teams operate. One that makes it 
in fact simpler for them, and more secure for you. Agilicux AnyX. Instead of requiring
that shared password, or reworking the world to fit into your existing identity 
provider, our identity-aware proxy allows any user (staff, vendor, support) to sign
in with their native identity (email), without another password, with multi-factor.
Instead of hacking in TeamViewer with a ‘supp0rt-p@ss’ type security, directly use
remote desktop with single-sign-on.

Want to learn more? Look in the upper right and [contact us](https://www.agilicus.com/contact-us/)!