Providing Time for Employees to Change Their Passwords

With the highly publicized Heartbleed vulnerability this week, a vulnerability in the core of internet security has been exposed. While the vulnerability hasn't been widely known, it has existing in perhaps 2/3 of the internet for more than a year, meaning any passwords that have been used during that time are likely compromised.

So what's a company to do? At Metal Toad (and hopefully your company) we are providing time for our employees to update their passwords. While the short term cost will have some minor impacts to productivity, the long term benefit of knowing that our employees - and by extension our company - are protected is potentially priceless.

How to do it right

• Dedicate time. When kicking off a password reset campaign, don't provide an option to reset passwords, block off some time where it is a mandatory task.
• Don't try to time box it. Provide whatever time is needed for employees to document (and reset) their passwords.
• Focus on the big stuff first. The most important accounts to fix are your email accounts, followed by financial accounts. Why email first? Because on most of the internet email provides a path to reset any and all of the passwords for accounts associated with it.
• When in doubt, check it out. While most sites have implemented the Heartbleed fix, you can always make sure by running the domain through this website: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ (Not every site will receive an A grade, but you can look at the details to see if the Heartbleed bug has been patched).

That's it! Let's go through an make sure we keep Heartbleed from turning into a Heart Attack!