How to Tell Whether You Need a Password Manager
How hack-friendly are your passwords? Is it a time for getting a password manager?
Passwords are not fun, but they’re indispensable. In many cases, they are the single most important security defense between your data and online thieves.
Passwords guard your social media accounts, your user accounts across websites, your app profiles, and more. If they fall into the wrong hands, your online data is compromised.
But while passwords are important, what about a password manager? Do you really need one or is it just one of those security props that are more trouble than they are worth?
Find out whether you should use a password manager and learn what to look for in one.
You Use Many Websites That Require You to Log In
Social networks, online stores, service providers, and internet banking websites require you to use a password. Without one, you can’t create a user account.
Keeping track of all these passwords can become a nuisance. Cookies help, but they tend to expire after a time. What’s more, cookies carry security risks and facilitate online tracking by websites and third parties, which you may want to avoid.
A password manager makes keeping track of all those passwords easy. It lets you create a master password that you can use to autofill all other passwords. It’s a big time-saver.
You Tend to Use the Same Password Everywhere
Do you tend to forget or mix up your passwords? Using the same password for all your online accounts is convenient. It saves you the trouble of having to use password recovery and keep changing your passwords regularly.
However, using the same password everywhere makes you vulnerable online. In the wrong hands, a universal password can become a skeleton key that unlocks your digital life to intruders. It can open doors to all your data, from your Amazon shipping address and PayPal billing information to your online private life on social media.
So far so good, but how can a password manager help here? After all, most password managers use a single master password, so what’s the deal?
It’s important to remember that good password managers are safe by design. They encrypt passwords and may store them not in your browser, but locally, on your computer, where they can be harder for hackers to reach.
At the same time, a good password manager adds another layer of protection by restricting the use of that password to the computer on which it was created. Two-factor authentication and inactivity locks add safety to a password manager.
You Need Stronger Passwords
Coming up with strong passwords that are also easy to remember can be tricky. And it gets harder the more passwords you have to create, and especially if you use different passwords for different accounts, which is one of the best ways to protect your personal accounts online.
There are free password generators out there, but they are not all secure. What’s more, complex passwords are very difficult to remember.
The easy solution to creating hard-to-break passwords and also remembering them is a password manager. An advanced password manager can generate and store encrypted passwords. It can use autofill to enter these passwords when needed.
You Like to Browse the Web Privately
Private browsers help you avoid the most obvious forms of online tracking. But there’s a downside – you have to give up on web cookies. This means that each time you visit an online store or social network you have to type your username and password to log in. After a while, it gets annoying.
That’s where a password manager comes in. A password manager can operate separately from your browser, or else come with its own browser or be part of a security suite that offers incognito browsing. A good password manager can remember all your passwords independently of cookies. That means you get both secure browsing and simple password management.
You Want to Improve Your Credit Card Security
There’s another area that a good password manager covers – credit card data. When you buy something online, you have to provide your credit card information. Some vendors offer to store this data for you to save you time. But this creates security vulnerabilities.
A password manager can encrypt credit card data and keep it locally on your device. It can then enter it when needed so that you don’t have to provide it each time. In this way, you avoid a chore and keep your data close.
You Want to Improve Your Online Security
A password manager can be part of a security suite like the System Mechanic® Ultimate Defense™ that proactively protects your computer from online threats. It can complement your antivirus and anti-malware scanner and help secure your web browsing.
Encryption is a powerful way to secure passwords stored locally, and a password manager can help with that. Even if you are good at creating and managing passwords, a password manager can still add another layer of safety while at the same time offering the convenience of a single master password.
