From Pwned to Protected: My Journey to Zoho Vault

“Pwned” is gaming slang for being comprehensively beaten. It is also what has already happened to most of the email addresses reading this, and there is a website that proves it in fifteen seconds.

In 2022, the password manager Hari Iyer had trusted for nine years was breached. Encrypted vaults taken. Source code taken. As founder and CEO of SyncEzy, holding credentials for more than 1,000 customers across 30 countries, that was not an abstract problem.

This is the talk Hari gave at Zoholics Sydney, brought online. Not a product demo: one business owner’s account of moving from reused passwords to a company-wide credential system, and what he wishes he had done eight years earlier.

It opens with an uncomfortable exercise. You will check your own oldest email address against Have I Been Pwned, live. Hari’s came back in 33 breaches. Someone in the Sydney audience came back with 285.

What we’ll cover:

• Two real incidents, including a phishing attack that emptied a customer’s payment account.

• Live: check your own email against Have I Been Pwned, and read what it means.

• Why password reuse, not password strength, is the failure attackers rely on.

• Leaving LastPass: what the 2022 breach disclosed and what the migration involved.

• Sharing accounts without sharing credentials, with MFA attached to the share.

• Time-based OTPs in the vault, and instantly revoking old access.

• Passkeys that live in your vault, not on one laptop.

• Migrating from LastPass or Chrome, and Q&A with Hari.

Who should attend:
Business owners, operations and finance leaders, IT and office managers, and anyone responsible for who has access to what. No security background assumed. If your team shares logins over chat, email or a spreadsheet, this is for you.

Zoho One subscribers: Vault is included in your existing plan.