Imagine a day where you didn’t have to juggle passwords.
No more sticky notes. No more notebooks with dozens of passwords scribbled in, crossed out, and scribbled in again. No more forgetting and resetting. No more typing them in all the time.
And even better, imagine secure accounts, likely even more secure than you could keep them on your own.
That’s the power of a password manager in your life.
A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for each and every one of your accounts. And considering the hundred or so accounts you have, that’s something that would take plenty of time if you did all that work on your own.
In all, a password manager can turn the pain of juggling passwords into a real comfort.
What’s a bad password?
Before we get into how a password manager can make your life easier while making your accounts more secure, let’s look at what makes up a bad password. Here are a few examples:
Obvious passwords: Password-cracking programs start by entering a list of common (and arguably lazy) passwords. These may include the simple “password” or “1234567”. Others include common keyboard paths like “qwerty.” Even longer keyboard paths like “qwertyuiop” are well known to hackers and their tools as well.
Dictionary words: Hacking tools also look for common dictionary words strung together, which helps them crack longer passwords in chunks. The same goes for passwords that contain the name of the app or service in them. These are “no brainer” words found in passwords that make passwords even easier to crack.
Repeated passwords: You may think you have such an unbreakable password that you want to use it for all your accounts. However, this means that if hackers compromise one of your accounts, all your other accounts are vulnerable. This is a favorite tactic of hackers. They’ll target less secure accounts and services and then attempt to re-use those credentials on more secure services like online bank and credit card companies.
Personal information passwords: Passwords that include your birthday, dog’s name, or nickname leave you open to attack. While they’re easy for you to remember, they’re also easy for a hacker to discover—such as with a quick trip to your social media profile, particularly if it is not set to private.
If any of the above sounds familiar, you’ll want to replace any of your bad passwords with strong ones.
What’s a good password?
We can point to three things that make up a strong password, which makes it difficult to hack.
Your password is:
Long: A longer password is potentially a stronger password when it comes to a “brute force” attack, where a hacker uses an automated trial-and-error system to break it. For example, an eight-character password using uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols can get hacked in minutes. Kick it up to 16 characters and it becomes incredibly more difficult to break—provided it doesn’t rely on common words or phrases. McAfee can help you generate a strong password, for stronger security with our random password generator.
Complex: To increase the security of your password, it should have a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers like mentioned above.
Unique: Every one of your accounts should have its own password.
Now, apply this to the hundred or so accounts you keep and creating strong passwords for all of them really does call for a lot of work.
Should I use a password manager?
Given its ease of use and the big security boost it gives you and all your accounts, the answer is yes.
A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for your accounts. These will take the form of a string of random numbers, letters, and characters. They won’t be memorable, but the manager does the memorizing for you. You only need to remember a single password to access the tools of your manager.
A strong password manager also stores your passwords securely. Our password manager protects your passwords by scrambling them with AES-256, one of the strongest encryption algorithms available. Only you can decrypt and access your info with the factors you choose. Additionally, our password manager uses multi-factor authentication (MFA), so you’ll be verified by at least two factors before being signed in.
Aside from the comfort of convenience a password manager can give you, it gives you another level of assurance—extra protection in an age of data breaches, because you’ll have unique passwords where one compromise won’t lead to others.
And whether or not you go with a password manager to create those strong and unique passwords, make sure you use MFA on every account that offers it. MFA offers another layer of protection by adding another factor into the login process, such as something you own like a text to your phone or notification to an authentication app. That way if a hacker has your password, they’ll still be locked out of your account because they lack that MFA code.
One more smart move: delete your old accounts
In some cases, you really don’t need some of your old accounts and the passwords that come along with them. Maybe they’re old and unused. Or maybe they were for a one-time purchase at an online store you won’t visit again. Deleting these accounts is a smart move because they’re yet more places where your personal info is stored—and subject to a data breach.
Our Online Account Cleanup can help, which you can find in all our McAfee+ plans. It scans for accounts in your name, gives you a full list, and shows you which types of accounts might be riskier than others. From there you can decide which ones you want to delete, along with the personal info linked to them. In our McAfee+ Ultimate plans, you get full-service Online Account Cleanup, which sends the data deletion requests for you.
Between this and a password manager, you’ll have one less thing to juggle—your passwords, and one less thing to worry about—if they’re secure from hackers.
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