Do you use a couple – three passwords in different variations? Perhaps with 123 or !? at the end? Do you have more than five user accounts? Put down what you have in your hands, read the blog post, and get yourself a password manager!

Keep your tongue straight in your mouth

Companies often have hundreds of accounts to keep track of, and even the average person likely has dozens of different passwords to manage. Remembering all the different strong passwords is almost impossible without resorting to some kind of trick. 

Our best trick is to invest in a Password Manager. That way, you don’t have to remember the passwords for each account. Additionally, it will be able to generate secure, random passwords for you and remember them so that you don’t have to.

A password manager stores your login information for all the websites you use, and helps you log in automatically. A password manager encrypts your password database with one master password. And this master password is the only one you need to remember!

Passwords should not be reused!

There are many things that can be reused, but passwords are not one of them. Reusing passwords is a serious problem for many companies because of all the password leaks that occur every year. 

Even large websites like Facebook and LinkedIn experience significant data breaches from time to time. Earlier this year, it was reported that there were data from 1.1 billion accounts for sale on the dark web.

When your password is leaked, the thief has an email address, a username, and/or a password combination they can try on other websites. This means that if you use the same login information everywhere, one leak on one website can give people access to all your accounts.

To  prevent your passwords from being guessed, you must use unique passwords on all websites. These should be strong passwords; long, unpredictable passwords that contain numbers and symbols.

Read here about how you can get started with multifactor authentication. 

How does a password manager work?

When you use a password manager and need to log into a website, you visit the website as usual. Instead of typing the password for the website, you enter your master password into the password manager, which will then fill in the correct information. (Provided that you have stored your contact information in the password manager, of course.)

When you are creating a new account, most password managers will offer to generate a secure and random password for you, so you don’t have to think about it either. Some managers can also be set up to automatically fill in address, full name, and email.

Learn more about how we can help you with IT security.