Forget All Your Passwords

How to use Password Managers + Duplicate Authentication to make your life easier. 

With all the data breaches that have occurred within the last year, many of us are starting to tune out warnings to reset our passwords. We all have so many. How are we going to remember all these new passwords?  After all, creating strong passwords means non-duplicated, longer, unpronounceable, passwords with numbers and symbols. The best passwords are the kind I cannot remember.

Password managers allow you to have unique, strong, unrecognizable passwords for all your websites. I personally use LastPass , which is free, but there are multiple options. Whenever I log into a website, it asks me if I want it to remember that username and password. I'll hit save, and it remembers it for me. I can log into my LastPass vault wherever I am. For my own personal devices LastPass will ask me if I want to let it fill in a user name and password. Certainly beats looking in the back of my notebook (full disclosure: this is how I used to manage my passwords).

Before you say but aren't you making yourself more vulnerable by placing all your passwords together? To some extent that might be true, except that I use two factor authentication. Meaning anyone stealing my passwords would also need access to an authentication key or an authentication app to get into my accounts. After I plug in my password I either type a single use 30 second code or put an authentication key into my USB drive.  I am the kinda person that worries that I will lose my authentication key or my phone and then how to do I access anything? I have not yet but I have a back up authentication key and a second device that also runs the application. That way I won't get locked out of all my passwords if I've lost my phone or key.

A bonus that comes with using LastPass is that it can run a security check on all my passwords. The check will evaluate whether or not I have weak passwords, duplicate passwords, or vulnerable passwords due to recent data breaches.  Another plus; I can also generate single use email addresses to mitigate internet tracking via Blur (formally DoNotTrackMe) to use as usernames. This helps increase my privacy online because I can no longer be tracked by my email address.

So forget your passwords and let me know how it goes via the comments or twitter @lickelarch.

-Stephanie Stone