Video: Password Security Tips from Proofpoint Customer Tony Hildesheim, Redwood Credit Union

Recently, Proofpoint customer Redwood Credit Union was kind enough to host me at their headquarters in sunny Santa Rosa, California, where Senior Vice President of IT, Tony Hildesheim took time out of his busy schedule to talk with me about how his organization uses Proofpoint to keep both employees and credit union members secure.

As part of that interview, Tony talked about some of the most serious threats that he sees to his members' security. In this excerpt, Tony gave some terrific advice about one of the most important things that web users can do to protect their safety: Use best practices for passwords.

 Check out this short video and feel free to share it with your friends, staff, users, etc.

In this short video, Tony explains how phishing attacks (and variations like vishing and smishing) attempt to get users to give up account credentials by appealing to greed, fear and/or charity.

Using best practices for your passwords can help protect you from these attacks. Tony recommends the following: Use strong passwords (that combine alpha, numeric and special characters), change them often and always use different passwords for different accounts.

Great advice, especially in light of some of the big security breaches we've seen in 2011 (for more on this topic, see my posts State of Texas Exposes Personal Information on 3.5 Million Residents - More Serious than Epsilon Breach? and Stay Safe from Email Threats in the Wake of Epsilon Email List Breach).

I've got more video with Tony talking about how his organization uses Proofpoint, too. Will post those to the blog shortly, but you can also go see them right now at http://www.proofpoint.com/youtube(along with many other interesting Proofpoint videos).