If you are anything like me you have a lot of accounts to keep track of. Email. Social Media. Finance. Work. The list is endless. Each of these accounts all do different things. But despite those differences they all share one thing, you want to keep them secure. You want to make sure that only you have access to these accounts.
Typically the best way to secure your account is to make sure that you have a good password. Ideally across your different accounts your passwords should be:
- NOT
password12345(or any other of the most common passwords) - Different for each account
- A decent length (at least 8 characters long)
- Complicated (using lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and special characters)
- Bonus: Random
But following these recommendations poses a problem. If you have so many accounts and each account needs to have a different complicated password, how do you remember them all? This is where a password manager becomes very helpful.
What is a password manager?
As the name suggests, a password manager is a software or service that keeps track of your passwords for you. It accomplishes this by helping you document what your password is for each individual account. And it keeps these records in a secure manner behind a “master password”.
A password manager allows you to maintain complex, random, and different passwords for each of your accounts without fear of ever forgetting what those passwords are. And all you have to remember is the master password that you need to access the manager.
Another way of thinking about it is that your account passwords are your “treasure”. They are precious and should only be accessible to you. Your master password is the “key” that you use to unlock the chest to get to the treasure. Only you know the key, so only you can access your passwords.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that you have taken the plunge and adopted a policy of using a password manager. Each of your account passwords is now a…
