Keeping track of your passwords isn’t easy, especially if you follow best practice. If you want to stay secure, you need a separate password for every website you log into. To maintain a sensible level of security, each password should be strong, using a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols, but that just makes it hard to remember, so you end up compromising to save your head from exploding.
But what you’re really compromising is your online security.
Depending on the type of website you’re logging into, being careless about password security could lead to someone else getting hold of personal data. And while it would be easy enough to change your password after the event, you cannot change your personal details such as your date of birth, maiden name, address, etc, so it’s important to protect them from prying eyes.
Password security
So how do you stay secure and sane at the same time.
Password managers offer a secure and flexible way to keep all your passwords safe and easy to remember.
LastPass is a great example of such a tool, it stores all your passwords behind one single secure login, and fills your login details for you whenever you need them.
With LastPass installed, each time you visit a new website with a user login, it will ask you if you want it to remember the login, like this:
And if you let it, LastPass remembers your username and password every time you visit the page and fills in your details like this:
LastPass helps you by taking away the need to remember complex passwords for each login, and by remembering it, you’re not forced into choosing one that’s easy to remember. LastPass will even generate a secure combination for you.
LastPass is not the only password manager out there. Check out the ‘Five best password managers‘ as reported by LifeHacker. Canary Dwarf has no affiliation with LastPass, but we do use and recommend it.