The fact is that passwords are not being utilized well and so your church or ministry may be SEVERELY vulnerable. If it was just going to be impacting you, I’d call you dumb and walk away. The problem is that you have so much private and financial information of individuals in your congregation that you need to be more responsible than you are right now. We want to help you increase your security tenfold.
LastPass is the option that you need. If you watch the video, there are several places that could be vulnerable because of the latest Heart Bleed security risk. But that is just one of so many different hacks that happen every month and so strong security policies and great supplemental software is needed.
Here is a bonus list to the video above to make the best use of LastPass and keep yourself best protected.
- Change your password monthly. This may seem like a lot, but if you get into a routine of doing this, you will live life so much safer. For those that manage professional accounts, it is almost neglect to do otherwise. Make it part of your first of the month ritual. Plus, with LastPass, it is so easy to set it and forget it.
- Share your passwords. Obviously I do not mean the traditional sense of sharing passwords, but instead use LastPass’s sharing feature where one person holds the keys to the church or ministry accounts and they maintain the security. Then when the senior pastor needs the keys, the secretary can shoot the password over to them.
- Don’t write it down. While you still have to memorize one password to access the LastPass account and it should be complex, do not get lazy and write down that one password. Otherwise you have just invalidated nearly everything you have done to this point. Make the password complex, but take the time to memorize it.
- Log out of LastPass So you have everything above setup and you are rocking it. Awesome! But if you stay logged into your LastPass account when you leave work or are done working for the next few hours but do not log out of LastPass, you can still have a security concern. It takes three clicks to logout and less than a minute to log back in. I’d say that is a good cost for ensuring your ministry’s security.
What policies do you have for password security?
Steve Steiner says
The last bit about logging out of Lastpass is Critical!!! Lastpass if used correctly is a great tool. However best use involves coming up with a completely random and as long as you can handle password to use as your last password and memorizing it, allowing Lastpass to create completely random and long passwords for your various accounts (and updating them regularly, not a problem since you don’t have to remember the passwords anyway), and NOT allowing Lastpass to remember your password. Unfortunately for the sake of convenience, users are often tempted to allow Lastpass to remember their password, and allow Lastpass to auto-login when they start their browser. This is the difference between making things more secure than they were, and in some ways making things less secure than they were. So being required to enter your last password per browser session is critical, churches and other ministries really need to create and enforce security norms for their users that include good password management, whether it is for a staff of 1 or 100.
Great vlog Jeremy, we should also do one on encryption (File Vault for OS X, BitLocker for Windows, and Truecrypt for almost anywhere else where the other two don’t fit) and perhaps one on VPN’s, especially for churches or ministries that do work in closed countries.
seventy8Productions says
Love it!
HeatherLeaCampbell says
Ha. So our church’s “administrative password” is only available to like .5% of staff. So in order to just download something like a font, I have to get a “temporary administrative password.” I could complain that it’s annoying, but I know it’s for the best!
seventy8Productions says
They app would allow you to have them simply send you the key and you’d never see it and never have to worry about it. Maybe they’d be up for it (and it’s super cheap!)