Bluetek IT Solutions Blog

In 2021, leadership was about finding new ways to deliver on commitments and grow, despite global challenges. It involved coaching teams that were working out of home offices and balancing new distractions and personal commitments – all while managing anxiety about what was to come. In 2022, we hope to finally put the pandemic behind us and set the tone for a new kind of workplace and workplace culture.

Whether you are a veteran leader or are stepping into a leadership role for the first time, you likely realize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for the times ahead. The following tenets can help you craft a leadership strategy that supports your team as they deliver results without disruption.

1. Create a culture that supports innovation

You should turn off autofill in your password manager, and stop using some browser password managers altogether, argues a Czech security researcher.

"Most password managers have the autofill feature enabled by default, even though it reduces the security of the stored password," said Marek Toth, a penetration tester at Avast, in a recent blog post.

Autofilling is when your password manager fills in the username and password fields in a website's login page with your saved credentials without you actively prompting the password manager. 

The characters pasted into the field can then be "read" by scripts present in the login page — such as might be preset in an online ad that has nothing to do with the page itself — and those scripts will be able to copy and send your username and password anywhere. 

Browser developers are making privacy a priority, but they still may not be doing as much as you'd like in fighting pervasive ad industry trackers. You can take your online privacy into your own hands and outsmart that online tracking, though. A good way to start is by adjusting some of your browser settings. 

Incidents like Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal elevated privacy protection on Silicon Valley's priority list by revealing how companies compile reams of data as you traverse the internet. Their goal? To build a richly detailed user profile so they can target you with more accurate, clickable and thus profitable advertisements.

Apple and Google are in a war for the web, with Google pushing aggressively for an interactive web to rival native apps and Apple moving more slowly -- partly out of concern new features will worsen security and be annoying to use. Privacy adds another dimension to the competition and to your browser decision.

The key to your online security is to have strong passwords, but the challenge is to create distinct passwords that you can actually remember -- or else you may fall into the bad habit of using the same login credentials for multiple accounts. According to LogMeIn, the company behind the LastPass password manager, you could very easily have 85 passwords for all your accounts once you count all of your social media, streaming, bank accounts and apps.

If your data is compromised, weak passwords can have serious consequences, like identity theft. Companies reported a staggering 5,183 data breaches in 2019 that exposed personal information such as home addresses and login credentials that could easily be used to steal your identify or commit fraud. And that pales in comparison with the more than 555 million stolen passwords that hackers on the dark web have published since 2017.

The identity protection of a post-password world isn't here for most of us. So in the meantime, try these best practices that can help minimize the risk of your data being exposed. Read on to learn how to create and manage the best passwords, how to be alerted if they're breached, and one crucial tip to make your logins even more secure. And here are three old password rules that wound up being dumb today.

Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues - enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.