Year in review: take a look back at 2024 with NordPass

Accolades and recognitions

We’re not ones to rest on our laurels, but there’s no harm in being proud of our wins from time to time. This year, our success was powered by industry recognition and our very own knowledge sharing that spread across the globe. So, let’s start this year in review by taking a minute to recognize what we’ve achieved in 2024.

PCMag Editor's Choice and Globee Awards

This year, we had the honor of being selected as PCMag’s Editors’ Choice and taking the top spot as the Best Premium Password Manager for 2024. NordPass’ ease of use, slick design, and additional cybersecurity features like Password Health and Data Breach Scanner were highlighted as some of the standouts of our product.

We also received two silver awards at the prestigious 20th Annual 2024 Globee Awards for Cybersecurity back in March. NordPass was recognized in the Password Management and Passwordless categories for its innovations in the password security field.

CNBC’s best password manager pick

We’re always happy to be recognized for our efforts to put security first, and we hope to raise the bar even higher next year. This year, CNBC Select created a list of the top 8 password managers on the market, with yours truly coming out on top. NordPass was noted for its strong XChaCha20 encryption, ability to store unlimited passwords and other sensitive data, and its multi-factor authentication support.

Top 200 Passwords

Over the years, the NordPass Top 200 Most Common Passwords list has become a tradition. For the sixth year in a row, NordPass has analyzed password usage trends across the globe to determine which login credentials are most commonly used—making them an easy grab for cybercriminals to test.

The top combinations included the likes of “123456” and “secret”. News about these password practices spread far and wide—our study was shared by over 2,000 media outlets across the globe, including The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. This time next year, we hope to see this year’s leading password combos far less frequently.

Industry expertise

We’re passionate about knowledge sharing and learning from the very best, whether it concerns compliance policies, technological developments, or future threats. Here are a few of our favorite knowledge-sharing moments from 2024.

The NIS2 Directive—legislation aimed at raising cybersecurity standards across all member states and improving their preparedness to deal with cyber incidents—officially took effect on October 17, 2024. NordPass has put together a practical handbook to help ensure your organization’s policies meet NIS2 compliance requirements with ease.

Another big topic on our minds was passwordless technology. NordPass CEO Jonas Karklys had the opportunity to sit down with Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and CEO of the FIDO Alliance, to learn more about how passkey adoption has been progressing and how this technology can adhere to global compliance standards.

Finally, if there’s one tech trend we couldn’t escape this year, it’s AI. Whether it’s generated content, chatbots, or even scams, AI seems to be playing a key role in the process. We were lucky enough to ask Adrianus Warmenhoven, NordVPN’s cybersecurity advisor and spokesperson, how AI may help out hackers in the near future during his visit to our offices in Vilnius.

Feature updates

The cybersecurity landscape is far from a smooth ride, and we’re making sure we stay on track by continuously bringing you new and improved features. Here are just a few of the major changes, reintroductions, and debut features from NordPass’ 2024 timeline.

All things sharing

Sharing credentials in the workplace is often impossible to avoid. Whether you’re onboarding new team members, saying goodbye to those leaving, or simply need to share access with colleagues before your vacation, your credentials must remain secure. That’s why one of our goals this year was to bring you a safer and more convenient way to share credentials.

Welcome to the new Sharing Hub, a new feature within the Admin Panel that allows Owners to view all shared items within and outside the organization. Sharing Hub lets you see which employees have access to which credentials, who shared what, and which access level is set. You can learn more about Sharing Hub in our dedicated blog post. 

Speaking of sharing access, we’ve made some big improvements here as well, allowing you more flexibility and control over what you share and how. We’ve introduced new access permission levels, so you can choose whether you want to let other users autofill, view, share, or edit shared credentials. You can also now restrict access with Time-Limited Sharing. You can toggle this setting to limit access to the shared password or other data from 1 hour to 1 month.

Find your exposed passwords quickly

We recommend routine password status checks to everyone. The Password Health feature on NordPass has always let you see which of your passwords are weak or reused. This year, we’ve brought another category to the list: Exposed Passwords.

This category shows if any of your passwords have been involved in a data breach. Unlike our Data Breach Scanner, which checks your email address against leaked data on the dark web, Exposed Passwords looks for your passwords specifically. Learn how to use Exposed Passwords in the dedicated FAQ.

Autofill and autosave improvements

Autofill and autosave are so essential to a password manager that you’d think their potential has been fully explored. But that’s far from the truth—there are still many tweaks and improvements to be explored and implemented. We’ve worked hard this year to deliver an improved autofill and autosave experience for our users.

This year, we focused on refining some of autofill’s core features. To start, NordPass can now recognize the subdomains of web addresses and match them to those linked to your saved credentials. This saves users the hassle of manually looking for the right login details when the password manager couldn’t detect them automatically.

Next, we expanded the website storage capabilities. You can now add an additional website to the credentials in your vault, eliminating the problem of duplicate credentials. We’ve also introduced a new feature that adds more granularity to the autofill and autosave settings. It allows users to decide which specific credential types NordPass’ autofill and autosave should ignore on either all websites or selected ones. Learn how to configure autofill and autosave in our dedicated guide.

Finally, we aimed to make your login experiences quick and seamless by introducing Instant Login. Whenever you visit a website, NordPass will prompt you to use your stored credentials and proceed with the login with just one click.

Making MFA convenient with the NordPass Authenticator

You know the drill—if you want your accounts secure, a password alone won’t cut it. We’ve long since crossed the border between multi-factor authentication being a nice-to-have, and a must-have. The problem is that for many users, setting up and using multi-factor authentication is a hassle.

We’re all about keeping it simple, though. That’s why we’ve launched NordPass Authenticator on the browser extension for our Business users, following last year’s mobile launch. Our patented Authenticator allows you to store and generate time-based one-time passwords directly in NordPass, without relying on third-party apps. Don’t worry about your one-time codes being easily perceived—NordPass uses biometric authentication to amp up access security.

Better yet, NordPass autofills these one-time codes for you, saving you time and eliminating the struggle of a code expiring before you submit it. Learn more about NordPass Authenticator in our blog post.

Build your own secret identity with Email Masking

Has your inbox ever been suddenly swarmed with suspicious offers from unknown senders after signing up for a service or completing a purchase? The culprits are websites that sell your information or are breached, exposing your email address to more unauthorized eyes than you’d like and making it a target for social engineering campaigns.

To tackle this problem, we launched Email Masking—a service that allows you to create a decoy email address and synchronize it with your real one. You can use your email mask to sign up for online shopping, subscribe to newsletters, or, if you need it for work, test rival services without showing your hand. Learn more about Email Masking and how to set it up.

Data Breach Scanner: better than ever

The year 2024 started with a bang when the largest data breach ever, known as the Mother of All Breaches (MOAB), involving over 12 terabytes of data, was discovered. Its scale had many users wondering: has my data been breached?

Data Breach Scanner gives you the answer in no time—and this year, we made sure it could check your financial details, too. Just add your email addresses and credit card details to the Data Breach Scanner, and it’ll alert you whenever it finds a data match on the dark web. We’ve also improved the overall user experience, ensuring businesses and individuals alike can keep an eye on their data. Read on about the updated Data Breach Scanner in our blog.

APIs and integrations

There’s no all-in-one cybersecurity tool that can fix all your business problems, but an integration or two can always help. That’s why, this year, NordPass added more integrations with data management and ID provisioning services to grant your organization a more well-rounded and convenient security toolkit.

• Entra ID and Okta user provisioning – organizations can provision employees using Entra ID and Okta access management solutions.

• Splunk^® – NordPass customers who use Splunk^® can receive automated activity analysis and generate reports for simpler data visualization.

• Vanta – Vanta’s API integration with NordPass helps organizations automate compliance workflows by synchronizing active members' data.

Additionally, NordPass has launched the Activity Logs API. Using the API, organizations’ Admins can extract the full activity log information to monitor employees' actions and investigate company-wide activities for potential risks. Learn more about the Activity Logs API in our guide.

MSP zone

Let’s take a minute to talk about our managed service providers (MSPs). While their customers get to enjoy all the updates and enhancements we’ve just covered, we dedicated time to making NordPass management simpler for our MSP partners, too.

ConnectWise PSA™ integration and open API

This year, we launched a new integration with ConnectWise PSA™. This integration allows MSPs to optimize workflow and generate usage reports. It provides daily and monthly usage information of all MSP-managed organizations. Read our blog post to learn more about the ConnectWise PSA™ integration.

Organizations that don’t use ConnectWise PSA™ can still access NordPass’ open API to have license usage data sent directly to their systems. Our dedicated guide provides more details about setting up the Provider API.

Automatic billings are finally here

We understand that manual monthly payment management can be a headache for MSPs. To alleviate this pain, we’re happy to finally introduce automatic billings for our direct partners. They can now add their billing details directly in the MSP Admin Panel to set up seamless automatic payments based on the monthly usage data.

Resource hub for MSPs

We hope to make the NordPass onboarding process smoother and more accessible for our MSP partners. For this, we’ve launched a new Resources page on the MSP Admin Panel containing all the key information, useful materials, and support contact details to assist with getting started with NordPass.

New launches

2024 in Nord Security has been the year of launches. By now, you’ve probably heard the likes of Saily and NordStellar. Likewise, things were brewing in the NordPass kitchen, cooking up new everyday essentials to simplify passkey use and track company data breaches. Let’s place the final cherry on our end-of-year cake and see what Authopia and Dark Web Monitor are all about.

Authopia

Authopia is one of the biggest projects the NordPass team has launched this year. This tool lets you easily add a passkey widget to a login form on any website or service, creating an effortless and accessible passwordless login experience.

Authopia is a simpler way to implement passkeys in organizations, as it has very minimal coding requirements. It’s also completely free, meaning that you can easily adopt it whether you’re a small business, a nonprofit, or a global enterprise. Learn more about Authopia’s vision and mission from Sorin Manole, Head of Product, R&D at NordPass.

Dark Web Monitor

With tens of terabytes of stolen data out there on the dark web, protecting businesses is as important as ever. And what better way for organizations to fend off threats in the dark than by shining a light directly on them?

Dark Web Monitor, powered by NordStellar, is a free tool that scans the dark web for your organization’s domains. Simply enter your company email address, and Dark Web Monitor will detect whether it has appeared in a data breach and, if so, which data has been affected and how serious the breach is.

So, what’s next?

As you can see, this year has kept us pretty busy, but we’re not slowing down our pace—on the contrary, we’re only getting started. Although we’re leaving this exciting chapter behind, we’re already eagerly looking forward to what 2025 has to offer.

We’ve got some big news to share with you in the near future—in fact, you might already notice some sneak peeks if you look closely. Make sure to stay tuned and go beyond the limits of password security with NordPass.