In this Spotlight* podcast, Yaser Masoudnia of LogMeIn and LastPass talks about the continued persistence of the password in enterprise IT environments and how its inevitable demise (and replacement) may be closer than you would think.

If you look back the seminal hacking film, 1983’s War Games, not much about the technology will seem familiar. The computer monitors are monochrome. There are modems instead wired – let alone wireless networks – to connect computers to the Internet and each other. Data is stored on 5 1/2” floppy disks. But one bit of technology is strikingly familiar: the password.

High school student David Lightman ( played by Matthew Broderick) makes a game of finding and using them: hacking into his school’s grading system and, eventually, guessing the password needed to access a back door account on a military supercomputer.

Senior Director Product Management, Identity Access Management, at LogMeIn

More than 35 years later, the security of a discomforting number of modern IT systems and networks is protected by the same flimsy and vulnerable defense. But how do we finally ditch the password and embrace something stronger, that’s resilient, easier to use and harder to abuse? The solution may be closer than you think.

To talk about it, we invited Yaser Masoudnia, the Senior Director Product Management, Identity Access Management at LogMeIn into the studio to talk. In this conversation, Yaser and I talk about some of the struggles that organizations have abandoning passwords and the trends that are moving organizations towards a passwordless future – and what password-less means.

(*) Disclosure: This podcast was sponsored by LastPass, a LogMeIn brand. For more information on how Security Ledger works with its sponsors and sponsored content on Security Ledger, check out our About Security Ledger page on sponsorships and sponsor relations.

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