Password Managers, Should You Use Them?

Its no secret that remembering all your passwords for all your digital accounts is difficult.

That’s why we see people fall into the bad habit of using the same or similar passwords for all of their online accounts.

This practice can be very dangerous for the average user. If one of the platforms that you have an account on got breached and your password got out into the wild then bad actors could use that password to login to all of your other accounts.

This is where password managers come to save the day. Password managers are applications that can be used to store and autofill the password of your online accounts. With a password manager, you are able to have complex and unique passwords for all of your accounts.

With a password manager you’ll only need to remember a single password (preferably a passphrase) for your password manager and that’s all that’s needed to login.

Password managers aren’t all sun shine and rainbows though, a lot of security experts don’t like password managers because they introduce a single point of failure and a required trust in the password manager to have strong security to protect your account.

There are password managers that offer answers to this concern, KeePass for example. KeePass is a password manager that is hosted locally on the user’s computer so the concern about having to trust a third-party somewhere is remediated.

Overall, password managers are a great tool to be able to manage all of your online accounts and being able to have a strong password for those accounts.

Recommended password managers are BitWarden (Free), KeePass (Free), Dashlane (Paid), 1Password (Paid), LastPass (Paid)

Above it was mentioned that a passphrase should be used over a password.

The difference between a password and passphrase can drastically increase your online security. A password typically consists of a single word with symbols and numbers thrown in, for example “Billy!123.”

A passphrase on the other hand is a collection of words or a sentence with numbers and symbols thrown in, for example “My$Friend$5Billy.” Passphrases makes it easier to remember longer passcodes and makes it infinitely more difficult for an attacker to crack a hashed version of the password.