What Is Proactive Credential Security and How Do You Implement It?

It’s important for security teams to evaluate their cybersecurity program to ensure they are prepared for the risks to come. 

To empower teams with a proactive credential security strategy, Dashlane hosted a webinar on the top credential security trends for 2025 and key strategies for building a proactive approach. 

If you weren’t able to attend the webinar, we’ve put together the top five takeaways from the conversation between our two experts: Dashlane’s Chief Technology Officer Frédéric Rivain and Director of Product Management Hans Raj Kumar.

And if you’d like to dive deeper into their insights, check out the replay!

Compromised passwords remain one of the leading causes of data breaches. Security research suggests that 80% of data breaches use compromised identities. This reality hasn’t changed in many years, but current trends such as the explosion of hybrid and remote work, along with shadow IT (unauthorized apps and services used by employees outside IT oversight), have increased the risk exponentially.

Dashlane’s recent Global Password Health Report found that unsafe habits such as password reuse continue to be a challenge. Our data shows that the average Password Health Score (a metric measuring password strength across an organization) ranges from 72.6 in Northern America to 79.8 in Eastern Europe. While that's an improvement from last year, the number of reused credentials remains prevalent, between 40% and 50% across regions. 

These findings should be a concern for organizations because they highlight that the risk from poor password hygiene is significant, with 68% of breaches involving human error, according to Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report. Malicious actors are constantly finding new ways to attack the identity, and vulnerabilities like unsafe passwords are making their job much easier.

These essential tools work together to protect identities across your environment.

Many organizations implement SSO, but that’s not enough because SSO doesn’t cover areas like shadow IT apps, personal credentials that employees use for work, and services that don’t support SSO. Adding a credential management solution like Dashlane to your identity and access management stack ensures all credentials are protected—including SSO logins. Additionally, MFA provides another layer of security in the event credentials do become compromised.

Our experts emphasized the importance of proactive credential security in addressing identity-related risks. Being proactive includes having visibility into the credential practices across your entire organization. 

For example, Dashlane’s Credential Risk Detection functionality offers comprehensive credential risk visibility through real-time detection so you can identify vulnerable employee accounts across the organization. By providing visibility into the use of weak and compromised passwords, the tool enables admins to identify vulnerable employee groups and improve their overall security posture.

Good password hygiene isn’t just a technical challenge—it's a cultural one. Human error, including the use of weak or compromised credentials, is at the heart of many security breaches. That’s why it’s essential to regularly educate employees about the importance of strong passwords and credential security.

But employees also need the right tools to stay secure. One way Dashlane helps is with a new feature called Credential Risk Alerts & Notifications. This feature proactively identifies at-risk credentials in context and sends automated messages to alert at-risk employees to secure their accounts.

Passwordless authentication like passkeys has emerged as a solution that boosts credential security and helps protect against phishing attacks. In addition to reducing the reliance on passwords, passwordless logins simplify authentication. Our webinar experts agreed that this technology can benefit every organization because it increases security without adding complexity while removing the friction for users. 

Even as passwordless authentication gains steam, passwords are not going away anytime soon. And malicious actors will continue to take advantage of human error and target identities. That means that securing passwords should be a priority for organizations going into 2025—and beyond.

To implement proactive credential security, organizations should: 1) Deploy SSO, credential management, and MFA as foundational tools; 2) enable real-time Credential Risk Detection for complete visibility; and 3) establish ongoing employee education paired with automated alerts for at-risk credentials.

Proactive credential security is an approach that detects and addresses credential threats before they lead to breaches, rather than responding after an incident occurs. It emphasizes visibility, real-time monitoring, and continuous employee education.

Reactive credential security responds to breaches after they happen, while proactive credential security identifies and mitigates risks, such as weak or compromised passwords, before attackers can exploit them.

The essential tools for credential security include single sign-on (SSO) for centralized authentication, a credential management solution for secure password storage, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for additional verification.