ShareFrom your online banking accounts to your social media accounts and everything in between, you must protect your online accounts with strong and unique passwords. With the average user having dozens of online accounts, it becomes a nearly impossible task to remember a long and complex password for each individual account. Thus, its common to see users reusing a single password across many accounts or using simple noncomplex passwords for their accounts. This leaves users vulnerable to “credential stuffing,” which is when one password is compromised, and an attacker can use the same password across different accounts. Password managers help users take their security to the next level by generating unique long and complex passwords for each account and storing them all for you.
A password manager, such as LastPass, is an app that can be installed on your computer, web browser, or phone that will create and store strong passwords for you and fill them in for you as you go to login. This solves the problem of trying to remember unique and complex passwords for all your accounts and allows you to easily keep best password practices. It seems like a large risk having all your passwords in one place; however, these apps take extra steps to ensure the safety of your passwords.
Your passwords can only be accessed if the “master password” to the account is input. This master password needs to be as long and complex as can be as it will allow access to all the passwords inside of the manager. Additionally, you should further secure your password manager account through two-factor authentication. This way, if there is ever an unauthorized login to the account, they can’t access your data without that secondary form of authentication. Like all software and applications, vulnerabilities and weaknesses in any password manager can put your data at risk. If the company or password manager app itself was to be compromised, your password is only stored in an encrypted manner on their servers, so the attacker would only see a jumbled mess of random characters. Protecting your online accounts involves many layers and much diligence. Implementing a password manager will be a strong layer of protection to add to your cyber awareness.
