What Is Identity Sprawl and How Can You Reduce It?
Reading Time: 4 minutesYou’ve likely left traces of your identity all over the web. What can you do to keep your personal information from falling into the wrong hands?
We focus so much on the damage cybercriminals perpetuate that we sometimes neglect the roles we play in their attacks. It might surprise you to know that you could be abetting attackers indirectly.
There isn’t much cyberattack actors can do without access to your personal information. When you create multiple accounts online, you litter the digital space with your fingerprints, giving them more than enough information to attack you through identity sprawling.
But how does identity sprawling work, and how you can prevent it?
What Is Identity Sprawl?
Identity sprawl is an act of spreading your identity indiscriminately online. To enjoy an application’s full features or services, you need to be a registered user. You provide your personal information to sign up and have your own account.
It doesn’t end with only one platform.
To use the next application, you need to open yet another account. As you open an account for every network or service you want to use, you are spreading your identity across the digital environment. Before you know it, your identity is all over the place. Like many internet users, you have more accounts than you are even aware of.
How Does Identity Sprawl Work?
Websites and other applications encourage people to create an account mostly at no cost. You have to be a registered user to access certain features and services. Since it costs you nothing in most cases to sign up, it’s the least you can do.
If you are a heavy internet user, you probably register on multiple applications in a month. When you look back to when you started using the internet, you’ll realize that you have created hundreds of accounts. Unless you have an application for managing your accounts, you must have lost track of them.
The implication is that your personal information is in places you can’t even remember. If you are like most people, you don’t close your account on an application even if you are no longer using it. An abandoned account isn’t as useless as you may think. It’s valuable to cybercriminals who can use the information in them to launch attacks.
Truth be told, memorizing several passwords isn’t easy. If you have multiple accounts, there’s a tendency for you to repeat the same password for those accounts. While this makes logging into systems easier, it exposes you to cyberattacks such as credential stuffing. Once an attacker figures out your correct password on a particular platform, they use it to access your accounts on other platforms.
Identity sprawling also prevails when you use weak passwords for your accounts. Generating strong passwords is a prerequisite to securing your accounts. But when you have multiple accounts, it gets harder to ensure that every password is as strong as it should be. So you might resort to using words and numbers you can easily remember.
Weak passwords are easy to figure out with brute-force attacks. Cyber actors can access your account by trying just a few password variations.
How Can You Prevent Identity Sprawl?
There’s a misconception that identity sprawl is an organization-focused problem, but that isn’t true. If you have multiple accounts online, you have every reason to worry about it.
As more digital applications and services spring up, the rate at which people use the internet increases. As an individual, you are creating more online accounts than ever. So, how can you get the most out of digital services without exposing yourself to cyber threats and attacks via identity sprawl?
Let’s look at some ways you can prevent it.
1. Use Single Sign-On to Prevent Creating Multiple Accounts
Single sign-on enables you to log into multiple accounts with just a single identity. Instead of creating a separate username and password on every online platform you use, it authenticates each application with your identity just once. You can sign in freely subsequently with the same account.
You don’t have to worry about creating new usernames and passwords to use online services. Your login credentials are constant and ready to use.
A common example of a single sign-on is Google. Have you ever logged into an application with your Google account without creating a new account? That’s it. More systems are integrating the Google single sign-on to enhance the user experience and help users secure their identity.
2. Adopt a Password Manager to Manage Passwords
If you must have a separate account for every application you use, you need to consider using a password manager. The inability to remember the passwords of multiple accounts isn’t peculiar to you; anyone would forget them too.
A password manager is an online application that helps you generate and store your passwords in an app or the cloud. It removes the burden of generating strong passwords off your shoulders and stores them in a secure location. All you have to note is the master password which you need to access the password manager itself.
Advanced password managers synchronize your passwords with the applications you use them on so you don’t have to enter them manually whenever you want to log in.
3. Delete Old or Inactive Accounts to Erase Your Identity
What were the earliest accounts you created online? You probably can’t remember some of them. Although you have abandoned those accounts, they could still be active with your personal information in them.
When you set up a new account, you create a new layer of your identity online. And that gives cybercriminals more avenues to access your personal information and steal your identity for their malicious gains. Keep your identity under control by deleting old or inactive accounts of yours. That way, you leave fewer trails of your personal information online.
Manage Your Online Interactions to Prevent Identity Sprawl
Verifying users’ identities via authorization and authentication is a security mechanism application owners implement to secure their systems. As a user, you must pass through such protocols to use their services. While you must do what is necessary, be mindful of spreading your personal information.
Ensure you maintain a single identity, manage your passwords effectively, and delete inactive accounts as you go about your online interactions. By doing these, you guard your personal information like the valuable digital asset it is. Attackers would have to look deeper to find something they could use to launch cyberattacks against you.
Reference: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-identity-sprawl-and-how-can-you-reduce-it/
Ref: makeuseof
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