[Infographic] Why Unified Commerce celebrates #WorldPasswordDay

It’s #WorldPasswordDay, that time of the year when statistics surface from the darkest corners of the internet, only to remind us that we haven’t quite overcome the “123456” password stage in human evolution.

Frankly, it’s no surprise: it’s estimated that the average user accesses 25 password-protected accounts per day. If we add personal accounts, everything from utilities, to online shopping, and all of the work-specific accounts, softwares and services, that number probably doubles. Top it off with a lifetime of passwords that you may or may not remember from previous companies and positions, accounts you’ve given up on, or passwords you were forced to update every 3 months, and the list grows exponentially.

How could you be expected to come up with only 12-character-long passwords made of random letters, numbers and symbols, AND never jot them down anywhere, when it is reported that 40% of organizations store admin passwords in Word documents and spreadsheets? A far cry from cybersecurity best practices. But what is there to do?

The only correct answer is to actually follow those password creation and management best practices:

• Don’t reuse passwords, however awesomely secure they may seem
• Words made of upper- and lowercase letters and numbers – H0tW4xC0mm3rc3 – aren’t hard to crack
• Unusual sentences like “Unified Commerce is number 1 in my book!”, where the first letter of each word with punctuation, work better: “UCi#1imb!”
• Use a password manager such as LastPass, to generate and store passwords
• Opt for two-factor authentication that verifies your login credentials through a second device or app

Luckily, for businesses who run on a Unified Commerce platform like Apache OFBiz Accelerator, which covers as many as 10 different business modules and software licenses that you’d otherwise have to buy and log into separately, the answer is: you only have one password, so you better make it good!

In celebration of the one platform-one password combo, we’ve gathered some of the latest statistics in password security in an infographic that will hopefully inspire you to make this the best password you’ve ever had: