At first it might seem extremely easy to use a password, right? You simply put it next to your user, you identify yourself and you enter any web page, application, or whatever. And yes, that’s right, but passwords involve much more than identifying yourself on a site, and this has to do with the security of the sites where we identify ourselves, because at any time, any outsider can enter our account if they manage to get our password, which happens much more frequently than you might think.
And, according to the Internet security office, up to 90% of the passwords that we Spaniards use are insecure . Inevitably, that makes us the victims of hacking by hackers. Nowadays they are the order of the day, even though it sounds far away, because every day there are security breaches in thousands of pages, applications or devices, and passwords are reflected in pages of the deep-web.
It is therefore convenient that we never repeat the same password under any circumstances, since, if they manage to enter and get our email and our password, the rest of the accounts with which we share these credentials will be vulnerable, so it is a real danger to repeat the password. same password twice. But don’t worry, because the solution to this is very simple.
Password managers
That said, there are many ways to enforce our user codes and be more secure in cyberspace. One of the easiest and most effective solutions is password managers, have you ever heard of them? They are applications similar to the operation of a safe -but digital- where we store all our credentials (yes, beyond passwords we can also store our user, the website to which it belongs), in an encrypted database that in turn works through a “master” key.
In other words, a manager is a place where we will store all our users and passwords in a secure way so that no one can access them, other than us and through an extremely secure and personalized password, called a master.
Tips for creating new keys
An important point or function of passwords is that they not only help us to improve our passwords by giving us advice, but also directly, through a series of patterns or questions, it will help us to create our own secure password. They will include, among other things, some type of information that we want to provide, symbols such as at symbols or exclamations, as well as numbers.
Password manager features
- Two-step authentication . It is essential that password managers have this function to protect our accounts and passwords. An Internet connection is required for this, and its function is to authenticate through two processes to recognize user-password, and then allow us to access the account from a new device or that is not recognized, in case they try to enter from somewhere outside the our.
- Encryption . What type of encryption does the password manager we use? It is something that depends on each application / program, and therefore we must find out the type of encryption it has. The better it is, the greater our security when saving and generating keys.
- Offline and online . It is also convenient to know if it is a manager that saves our passwords in the cloud or locally. Although it may not seem so obvious, if the password manager uses a server, it is not free from cyberattacks, which is why the type of encryption it uses is so important, as we mentioned in the previous paragraph.
- Computer / mobile . Usually we will use our ‘password safe’ in a computer program, but it is important to know if we have the option to have the same application for our smartphone, because in this way we can also work with our keys from mobile phones, which greatly simplifies the job.
- Vulnerability alerts . This is one of the star functions of the managers: to notify us if there has been a security breach or leakage of our data on the Internet. It is vitally important that you notify us as quickly as possible so that we can change our data or passwords and prevent this leak from being prolonged over time.
Given these main characteristics, now it is you, as a user, who must choose a good password manager that takes into account these characteristics listed above, because not all managers are the same or have the same characteristics.
