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On World Bee Day (last Saturday), The Journal published a very interesting article by Paul Handrick (‘The Bee Guy’) about what we can do to “save the bees”.
Did you know that “saving the bees” does not mean saving the honey bees?
This is because the honeybee is not one of the species that is under threat. There have never before been so many honeybees on the planet.
In reality, it is native wild bees – bumble bees and solitary bees – that need our help.
So what?
Many of us may think we are helping to ‘save the bees” by introducing a bee hive into our garden.
However, a bee hive introduces thousands of bees that are not under threat. And these bees will collect food from the flowers in our garden.
Apparently, the honey bees from one bee hive will make 10 million visits to flowers every day.
So what?
Introducing a bee hive will actually reduce the food available for the other types of bee that need our help.
So, if we want to ‘save the bees’, we shouldn’t introduce hives into our garden. We should introduce flowers (preferably, wild flowers).
So what has this got to do with cyber security?
We need to ensure we are not introducing security bee hives* into our organisations.
Because while it may sound like the right thing to do, it will only make things worse.
* An example of a security bee hive is forcing people to use complex passwords (i.e. a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols). In reality, a long password is far better than a short, complex password. This is because a long password (e.g. a sentence) is easier for a human to remember but more difficult for a cyber attacker to guess. You can read more about password security here. And don’t forget about the password dinghy and Multi-Factor Authentication cruise ship.