Under Lock and Key – Password Management is Critical

    Under Lock and Key – Password Management is Critical

It’s been discussed before how critical password management can be to keeping all your personal and business account information safe from would-be criminals, but it never hurts to revisit this topic for the latest and greatest information. It’s risky to rely on a weak password or passphrase even if its easier to remember. Those who are looking to take your information are pros at password cracking, so you must be on your game when it comes to protecting your accounts

If you do not have the ability to safeguard a hard copy list of all your passwords, you might want to consider a password manager. It can help you seamlessly oversee and manage all your log in credentials for any online account and maintain complete password security.

The best password managers also have a password generator tool to create strong and unique passwords to ensure you aren’t using the password in multiple places. Having a unique password at each site you visit can go a long way in ensuring that your information won’t be stolen on other sites. Having a manager in place also means you don’t have to remember the various other pieces of information like shipping addresses and credit card information as you can autofill in forms or fields as needed if you have a master password or pin created.

Bitwarden is considered one of the best free password managers around, but you can also sign up for a premium subscription starting at $10 a month. It works with a variety of platforms from Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iPhone just to name a few. One of the best paid subscription managers is Last Pass. Base price for this service is $36 per year and works with a variety of OS’ and has a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera as well. Unfortunately, there was a change made in 2021 that requires you to choose where you manage your account, either on your mobile devices or your desktop if you are using the free version. This means if you choose mobile, you’ll be able to access your account across your phones, tablets, and smartwatches, but not on your laptop or desktop unless you upgrade to the Premium subscription.

You may be asking yourself, but what if a password manager gets hacked, what do I do then? Its true, even the best managers have security vulnerabilities and can sometimes even be hacked. However, a quality password manager will always be based on a zero-trust security model. This means that your master password along with all your other stored information and data are encrypted at the device level and never accessible to the password manager or an outside party. You should rest easy knowing that even if the password manager was attacked, the attacker would not be able to get access to the contents of your password vault. As always, do your own research and find the one that is right for you, but selecting is better than going without in the name of security.