Why Do I Need a Password Manager?

Whether you’re on the internet all day or sign on only occasionally, all of us have a lot of passwords to manage. What’s more, security experts recommend we use powerful and unique passwords for each online account to prevent serious crimes like identity theft. Fortunately, there’s an easy solve – a password manager.

How can you choose a safe password?

Today, hackers use sophisticated software that can decipher all but the most secure passwords. Your pet’s name or your child’s birthday, while personal, isn’t necessarily a stumbling block for hacking software these days. Randomly generated passwords using a long and unique string of characters are simply the only answer, and password managers use that technique.

Can you safely store passwords on your computer or mobile phone?

If you keep your passwords on your computer’s hard drive, they become an easy target for hackers or scammers who gain remote access to your computer. In fact, any time you share your computer all your private information becomes available, including that master list of passwords. Likewise, when you store the passwords to your accounts on your phone, they become accessible to anyone who gains access to that device, like thieves. Using a password manager allows you to store your passwords on secure servers, away from prying eyes, hackers, and thieves.

What does a password manager do?

Let’s face it, many of us have bad password habits. That’s where a password manager can help. This piece of software creates secure passwords, stores them, and automatically inputs them when you access your various online accounts.

That’s right, a password manager can create the long, complicated combinations of characters that make a truly secure password. And the best part is that it remembers them for you. The days of using the same password for every single account are over. With this piece of software, you only need to remember one password, the one for the password manager.

How does a password manager help you?

A simple password offers almost no protection, and studies show that many people choose their birthday or numbers in sequential order. Hackers bank on that behavior to allow them to gain access to your accounts with their sophisticated software. A password manager can thwart attempts to break into your bank account, email and social media sites that can catch you unaware otherwise. The combinations of capital and lowercase letters, symbols, numbers and punctuation marks that a password manager generates make it exponentially harder for hackers to steal your stuff.

Can you safely rely on a password manager?

You may be asking what if a hacker breaks into my password manager? It’s an unlikely scenario, but even if it were to happen, a password manager encrypts your data and makes it unreadable. There are also a few best practices you can follow to make your manager even more effective and reliable. First, while using a password manager ensures you only need to remember one password, you need to make sure that password is a strong one. That means you need to make it a random mix of capitals, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Also, make sure you turn off the autofill feature on your browser and copy and paste your passwords from your manager in manually.