Three levels of security to protect passwords

Government figures show that four in ten UK businesses and two in ten UK charities were the subject of a cyber breach or attack in the last 12 months. Phishing attacks alone rose by 27.5% to reach over 137m in the third quarter of 2018, exposing people’s email and passwords, to cyber criminals to sell on the dark web or exploit to access company networks.

Mycena Password Fortress sets out to combat this with an innovative approach to password security. Rather that storing passwords on the cloud and giving users a master password, Mycena offers a decentralised three-tiered password protection system using offline storage of passwords and three layers of protection inside the device.

Julia O’Toole, Founder of Mycena, explained: “Strong and unique passwords are critical to staying safe online, especially in the modern era where data breaches have become the norm. Passwords are essentially the keys that open the front door to our digital world, from our bank accounts to our communication accounts, our entertainment accounts to our social accounts. They allow our day-to-day running of our business and personal lives.

“Cyber attacks have increased by 75% in the last two years while 81% of those breaches were linked to weak, stolen or repeated passwords. Quite simply, using the same password or variations of it is the modern day equivalent of exiting your office or home leaving your front door wide open.”

The Mycena Password Fortress app offers another level of security to keep passwords safe and secure. Once the app downloaded, it can turn your device into an electronic vault with three levels of security using the patent-pending Method of Access of Structured Stored Data. The app will then help you generate strong, unique passwords for each account, which means passwords are never repeated, so there is no risk of leak propagation. It will then use SHA-256 encryption and save passwords locally inside the device. 

Only the user can access the passwords through a triple-tiered combination of fingerprint, pin, lock pattern, voice passphrase and face ID.

O’Toole added: “In addition to the triple-levelled password protection, we wanted to rid of the standard master password that other password managers use. Master passwords being a single point of failure, if a master password is forgotten, lost or stolen, you risk losing everything. Mycena was built to protect our personal and family assets. 

“In light of recurrent data breaches affecting government and critical infrastructure, the solution is particularly pertinent for those organisations who hold critical data in industries such as defence, police, government, energy, water, utilities, infrastructure, technology, banking, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, transport and law where data breaches potentially impact the entire population.” 

The Mycena Password Fortress app is free to download, comes with 30 day free trial, and is available on App Store or Google Play.