If you are currently employed anywhere, chances are pretty good that you must manage anywhere from 20 to 100 passwords for every different vendor you work with. Add all your personal accounts, and you could have well into the hundreds of logins.

Did you hear about the home security cameras being used by hackers to spy on people, and even talk to them through their camera? Do you have any idea what this has to do with password security?

It’s not a huge leap to imagine how the two are related. Let’s say you have one password you use for all things in your personal life, and it’s your birthday: 111950. Pretty easy to remember. Now, let’s say that you created an online account at Target or Home Depot in the last few years, which were subsequently hacked.

Tens of millions of accounts were hacked from Target’s and Home Depot’s servers over the years. Read more about those here: Target  |  Home Depot

Who cares if your shopping history at Target is accessible to some random person on the internet? Maybe nobody, but WHAT IF you are one of the millions of people who ALSO have a home security camera system that’s Wi-Fi enabled? And what if your one of the millions who uses one password for everything? Guess what; some nefarious actor sitting in their parent’s dark basement can now see your cameras in your home, turn them on at will, and talk to you or your kids through them.

Now, let’s imagine a circumstance when your same password is used for work. Well that’s bad for a bunch of reasons.

Do you refuse to somehow remember 50 different passwords with upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters, and somehow be able to change them every month? Me too.

Do you want to still remember just one password? Me too.

https://www.lastpass.com/

So just use a free password management software. Problem solved. It only costs money if you use fancy features. And no, we don’t get paid for this endorsement. We just like this password keeper the best after using 3 or 4 others. The same password keeper can be installed on your phone, tablet, iPad, and computer. And it syncs all of them. So you update your password in one system, it saves to all.

If you use it for work and have some random vendors for which you need to share passwords with your team? Upgrade for a few dollars a month and create shared folders for your team.

Additionally, I would be remiss to write an article about password management and not also mention the usefulness of 2FA (two-factor authentication).

For important things, such as your bank account, and email account, and credit card vendor, use 2FA please. This way, the only way your password gets some hacker access to your stuff is if they also are physically able to steal your phone and log into it. Since that pretty much is impossible, enabling the annoying text every time you log into your bank account is a sure-fire way to keep your money yours.

Enough on this!

Keep using one password, just make it the one Master Password you use for logging into a password keeping software, and use the password keeping software to generate long passwords that are complicated.

One quick online search for ‘Password Hacking Software’ will prove to you how easy it is, with a simple computer, to guess your birthday.