Make peace with your online passwords with a password manager

Common password mistakes and how to improve your cybersecurity with a password manager

Today's expression: A breeze
Explore more: Lesson #326
January 4, 2021:

You know what’s the worst? Remembering passwords. But you know what else is the worst? Getting your account hacked or a big security breach. 2021 should be the year for improving your password hygiene: ditching reusable passwords, your password Excel document, and signing up for a password manager tool. Today, we’re talking about the best password managers. Plus, learn “a breeze.”

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Today, we’re talking about the worst feature of the internet: passwords, and how to manage them

Lesson summary

Ready for another year together? This is the first Plain English lesson of 2021, and it’s number 326. I’m Jeff, JR, as always, is the producer, and he has posted the full lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/326.

Let’s kick of 2021 with a little self-improvement: passwords. If that word causes anxiety, then you’re probably not using a password manager. Don’t worry: I’m not either. But today, we’ll talk about the benefits of using a password manager and why I will be adopting one in 2021. The expression is “a breeze” and we have a quote of the week.

How to manage all your passwords

We’ve all been there. You’re staring at the login screen for your bank’s website, or Amazon or a streaming service, and you can’t remember what password you used. How are you going to get into your account?

Or perhaps it’s a site you think you visited this time last year, when you were buying a holiday gift, but you can’t remember for sure. Did you register? Do you have an account? If you do, what e-mail address did you use for that?

It’s a problem any internet user has faced: most of us have dozens or even hundreds of accounts, and each account needs a username and a password. Some people try to make things easier on themselves by using the same password for different sites. Or perhaps all their passwords start the same way but have different letters or numbers at the end.

By now, we all know reusing passwords is a bad idea. If just one site gets hacked, you are at risk even if you don’t have payment details stored with that vendor. Here’s why: the hackers often sell the combination of the username and password. Then, other hackers can try that same combination on many hundreds of web sites. If you register as a user on a blog, and that blog’s data is stolen, then hackers will try your email and password combination on many other sites, like banks or shopping sites. They use elaborate scripts to do this with thousands of usernames and sites, all at a high speed.

So we know reusing passwords is bad. But guess what? So many people do it anyway—and I am even guilty of that. Why? Because it’s easier. w I know it’s wrong, but sometimes I just can’t bring myself to invent a strong password and then track it somehow.

One solution to this is to store passwords in a Word or Excel document. I’ve done this. But this can get unwieldy and hard to manage; plus, that document could get hacked and then you’d really be in trouble. Another problem is that you don’t always have access to that document, especially if you use multiple devices.

Plus, there’s still the problem of inventing a secure password. The scripts hackers use rely on words in the dictionary, so any password that contains a dictionary word or a name or a small combination of numbers is an easy password to hack. Unfortunately, these are the passwords our human brains can invent and remember, too. The solution is one of those long passwords with a nonsensical combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. But it’s exhausting to try to create one as a human, much less remember it or save it for later.

If this password dilemma sounds familiar, don’t worry. There are tools that can help. What you need—and what I need—is a password manager.

A password manager is a program that takes care of everything for you. It can create, store, and even fill in passwords on your computer and mobile phone. All you have to do is remember one master password that unlocks all the rest.

Password managers are flexible: they come as browser extensions, desktop apps for Mac and Windows, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. That’s critical: you need to have your passwords available wherever you go. They work for web sites but also for stand-alone applications on your computer, like Zoom, for example.

The most popular password managers are LastPass, 1Password, and Dashlane. Most have a freemium model, where at least some of the service is free to use. LastPass in particular has a great free version. Dashlane lets you store 50 passwords free, but the paid version is only three dollars a month—a bargain when you consider everything that’s at stake.

Most password managers work in the same way. When you register with a website for the first time, your password manager will create a new password for you. You can choose how long you want it to be, and how complicated. You can also enter passwords you’ve come up with yourself, if you prefer. Either way, your password manager tells you how strong your new password is, and then remembers it for you along with the username you chose.

The next time you visit that website, your password manager will fill in the username and password you created, making logging in a breeze. All you need to do is login to the password manager itself to get at all the passwords stored within its vault. No matter how many unique passwords you create, and no matter how complicated they are, all you ever need to remember is one master password.

But that’s not all they can do. Password managers are good for storing all sorts of sensitive information that you might want to fill into forms online, but that you can’t memorize.

Password managers can also store credit card numbers, bank account details, national ID numbers, wifi passwords: any important, sensitive piece of data that you can’t remember, but that you might not want to leave lying around. Think of it as an old-fashioned safe-deposit box for digital accounts.

Some modern web browsers can reproduce some of the functions of a password manager, but not all of them. Chrome, for example, can suggest and remember secure passwords for each site you visit. It’s certainly convenient if you are a heavy Chrome user from the same computer. The problem is the data remains tied to your browser, so if you create a login on your laptop it won’t be available on your phone or on another laptop.

A good password manager will even help you by performing a security audit. The software will keep track of which passwords are weak, or old, or used in more than one place. Some even let you know if a website where you have an account has been hacked. At the click of a button, you can have a list of all the passwords that you need to change. And some password managers can even change them for you automatically.

It’s time…

It’s time. It’s past time for me to start using a password manager. I’ve tried every method in the book. I tried using the same password everywhere—not smart. I tried using the same base password and just changing a letter or number based on the site. Again, not smart. I tried tracking all my passwords in an Excel document—a little better, but still not ideal. Now I use Chrome’s password manager, but it doesn’t work if I have to log in on my phone.

So that’s it. I’m getting a password manager. I’m recording this before Christmas, but one of my goals for my time off over the holidays is to transition to one of the three password managers I mentioned. I think I’ll try LastPass. I’ll let you know in a few weeks if I was successful.

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Expression: A breeze