Password Management

Recently I have noticed how insecure my friend's and family's online accounts are due simply to poor password management. Even people that have grown up around computers seem to not put much effort into protecting their accounts. There are a few steps I have taken to avoid any of my accounts being compromised. The first is that I started using an encrypted password manager to house all of my passwords. The password manager I use is called LastPass but there are many others out there. I would not suggest using a browser such as Chrome to manager your passwords as it is not encrypted or secure. You then must set a master password for your password manager. I choose to have a master password that is roughly 20 characters long with a mix of numbers, capital letters, lowercase letters, and a few symbols. I change this password every three months and have a reminder on my calendar so I ensure this gets done on a consistent basis. You should not use this password anywhere else. I do use the same password for my Windows login as they way I have my password manager setup means if someone is able to login to my PC then they will also have access to my password manager. I realize this does sacrifice some security, but it is somewhat logical considering this. I then went back and updated all of my existing passwords on sites to a randomly generated 15 digit password that would be impossible to guess. The password tool I use, LastPass, has a password generator built-in. This will take a while. It took me half a day (6 hours) to update all of my existing passwords. You will then want to delete any password data within your browser and turn off the save password setting within said browser. Moving forward all of your passwords to new sites or future updates to existing sites should all be randomly generated so none of them are the same. This will make it almost impossible for any of your accounts to be compromised and after the initial setup is extremely easy to maintain. Lastly, I would also suggest fully encrypting your phone and computer to avoid any data being extracted from physical devices. I would be glad to answer any questions about this topic and know that it is extremely important to take this seriously as we keep most of our lives on the internet and/or on our devices.