Thursday, August 20, 2015

Why You Should be Using an Online Password Manager

Do you use your pet's name or favorite sports team in any of your passwords?  How about your birthday or an easy to remember pattern?  Or maybe you have given up completely and just use the word “password?”  If you do, then I am sure that all of the hackers of the world would love to thank you for making their jobs that much easier!  With access to your online accounts so simple, they are able to track down all sorts of personal information.  How kind of you to make sure that their profession remains easy and lucrative.  What’s that?  You don’t want to be their victim and have your name on their mortgages and credit cards?  Well, what if they just open up new credit cards in your name and a ton?  No?  Well then, it is time that you learn a thing or two about password security and maybe look into an online password manager to help keep your information secure.

Forget using your kid’s name or your favorite color.  Secure passwords should not even be words.  They should be random and include numbers and special characters.  You think you are safe because you added a special character at the end of a word?  Yes, because I am sure that hackers have never considered that clever combination. Well done.

In reality, all of the obvious substitutions and combinations are well-known among hackers, so a secure password needs to be a random one.  If you are able to remember lots of different passwords, either you have an exceptional memory (so why were you using “123456” in the first place?) or your passwords are not secure.

So, what are you supposed to do if you can’t remember secure passwords?  Consider using online password management.  This stores your passwords for you and enters them automatically after you enter a master password.  This master password still needs to be secure, but you are far more likely to remember just one secure password than a different one for every site.  Your password manager online allows all of your other passwords to be completely random.  You would never be able to remember them, but they would not be worth the time that it would take a thief to crack them.

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