Why is a password manager a good idea? If someone gets the password to the password manager account, they have access to all my accounts.
EDIT: Thank you all for your input and advice. It it is greatly appreciated!
In: Technology
Is there any benefit to using LastPass over the built-in password managers in Chrome, Firefox or Edge?
Is this post inspired by this? https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ohqt2u/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_security_questions_are/h4rlkvi/
The point is to have one really good password for your to remember, rather than having not great passwords for everything.
If you keep your password file locally on your computer then the threat actor would first have to get the file, then figure out your password.
It is still putting your eggs in one basket, but making it into a fortress is way safer than the simple tricks people do.
Password managers encrypt the password into unreadable formats before they store the passwords..
I will say you are correct but password managers are supposed to have very complex passwords with random caos and lowercases numbers and symbols. My pass manager is 27 charcaters long and its all random. In my head i have a sentence to help remember. Password manager companies also have high level encryption so if you are hacked they still dont see passwords
The advantage of using a password manager is that you can then use very strong passwords (16+ characters of gobbledygook) that you don’t have to remember, and use a unique password on each site/app/etc so if one is compromised your other accounts are still safe. Personally I use an offline manager called KeePass which runs locally on my machine and is not accessible from the net, so no one but me has access to my master password or database.
1. When you use the same password for everything, a single leak can lead to a lot of loss. Smaller websites get hacked relatively regularly and password managers can track this and tell you when it happens, and which other accounts you have with the exposed password, helping you change them before anything bad happens.
2. Password managers save you from having to remember your passwords, and allow you to use more complex passwords that you might otherwise have trouble typing out consistently or quickly. Usually they fill in the password field for you, so you can have passwords that are really hard to guess like 7F62Gn!hry3QQ, and can allow you to have different passwords for each account you use
Web sites are hacked all of the time ([haveibeenpwned.com](https://haveibeenpwned.com)). Your password on at least one site is probably circulating the dark web as we speak, and it’s only a matter of time before someone tries the same username and password on more interesting sites to see if they can get in. Password managers foil this kind of hack.
Unless you re-use your password manager password elsewhere, you’re pretty safe, but you’re right that this is now a much more valuable password, so use a long one, don’t reuse it, and don’t type it into a fake web site by mistake.
Double up with 2factor (security keys ideally and avoid sms) on accounts you really care about. That way even if they steal your password they still can’t get in.
You probably have a lot of different accounts online for things like shopping, banking, subscriptions, etc. Each of those accounts needs a password. Most people will come up with one password that they can remember and use the same password for every account
But, sometimes the companies that you have accounts with don’t do a great job of keeping your password secret. And if one of them messes up, now the password for all of your accounts isn’t a secret anymore!
Most people will make up passwords that aren’t very strong either, because weak passwords are usually easier to remember. If you use your birthday or the name of a family member, these passwords aren’t very hard to guess, especially for a computer who can make lots of guesses very quickly
A password manager helps you to fix both of these problems. With a password manager you can come up new strong passwords that are different for each account you have and you don’t have to worry about remembering them. So you can have a password that looks like this: `!DzWifTKNkrNJN$&Y5M%` for one website and this `HXf^N52S5S@up*@L9Z8!` for another website
The only password you need to remember is for your password manager. And luckily there is a neat trick to have a password that is easy to remember but still pretty hard to guess. It’s called Dice Word and it looks like this: `flyable-bootie-overrule-boots-easing`
Also, you can use 2 factor authentication to keep your password manager secure, which is a fancy way of saying that in addition to your password, you also need to have access to something you own to log in like your phone or a special USB key
I use a different password manager from One Password, but I find they have some of the best communication on what a password manager does, why it’s important to have one, and other ways to understand digital security. So I would recommend checking out their website if you want to read more: https://1password.com/password-manager/
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