Member-only story
Choosing the right password manager to keep your secrets safe
If you’re not using a password manager by now, you should be. Ever since reading the xkcd: Password Strength comic many years ago, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by how the software industry has continued to enforce bad password practices, and by how few services and applications apply best practices in securing our credentials.
The main reason for password reuse or using poor passwords in the first place is because it’s way too hard to remember lots of good ones.
By forcing us to remember more and more passwords with outdated rules such as demanding symbols, numbers and a mix of uppercase and lowercase characters, most people have turned to using weak passwords, or reusing the same passwords or patterned recombinations of those passwords and leaving us vulnerable to simple exploits.
I recently learned about ‘; — have i been pwned?, and I was shocked to discover that some of the breaches that included my personal data included passwords that I had no idea were compromised… for years. Then I looked up my wife’s email address, and together we were horrified.
Lots of those compromised credentials were on platforms we didn’t even remember we had accounts on, so asking us what those passwords were and whether we’ve reused them elsewhere is futile.
