Last week, I wrote about a subtle security enhancement that password managers provide out of the box. This week I want to highlight the main reason why I like password managers.
Password managers are awesome for creating and storing unique and very hard to remember/guess/crack passwords. Which makes them an invaluable tool in this day and age, where every site wants you to remember a password. So why should you. Every site can have a different password, yet you only need to remember one password for all of them. The one you use to unlock your password manager.
That means that the password needs to be strong, but easy to remember. I take a sentence as my password. This passphrase comes from a book, game, series or movie I like. To make things harder, I change the sentence by combining it with something else I like such as a term from something that interests me. For example, take the sentence "The last suit you'll ever wear." from the movie Men In Black. Now since I'm a geek, I would change it to "The last p4ssw0rd you'll ever need.".
It has everything a strong password needs: it's long, it has a mix of letters, both upper and lowercase, numbers and special symbols. Most important of all, it's easy to remember, yet hard to guess. Now don't take this exact sentence, cause now it's out there. It's also not a password I use. So go ahead and try it out, it won't work.
If you aren't using a password manager yet, you are running out of excuses. So if you don't have a password manager yet, head over to 1Password, my favourite, or any other password manager.
Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored by 1Password, nor do I get a discount or any other benefits. I fully support this service as a paying user because I think it is an awesome service.