You Need a Password Manager Table of Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • History The Internet is not a safe place. It was never designed to be.

Its adoption has increased far beyond what its creators ever dreamed could ever be achieved. Security was an after-thought, because the creators were too wide-eyed and optimistic to think that anyone could ever use this new technology for evil. But today we no longer use the internet for its original purpose of. We use it for communication, for business, for commerce, for research, for recreation. As we continue into the 21st century, one 20th-century holdout returns to bite us in the butt and: passwords. Companies fall victim to breaches carried out by state-sponsored actors, opportunistic hackers, and curious researchers.

Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac iOS 9.3 has a new feature that allows you to protect your sensitive Notes with a password or with Touch ID. It’s a great way to keep stuff like security codes.

With each new breach comes another treasure trove of user logins and passwords. Thorough analysis of the exfiltrated data only confirms what we already know: people are lazy when it comes to passwords.

They're short, they're weak, and they're re-used between different websites. It is important to stress that this is not your fault. Once upon a time, the average person only had a handful of passwords they had to remember. Whether it was the password to their local/work computer, to their email provider, or to their favorite message board, no one really cared if your password was only six characters and all lowercase.

In most cases the password was stored locally--it's not as though it could be shared with anyone. The User's Dilemma Today, however, the average person has dozens of logins. They have multiple computers they might log into in a given day. They have several different email addresses to manage their personal/work/student emails.

They have logins for their various social networks, logins for their music streaming sites, their gaming sites, their e-commerce sites. They have logins for their banks, their pay-stubs, their insurance providers, their medical bills. And each site (for your safety, of course), mandates a password that must satisfy the following requirements: • Rotate every 90 days • Never be re-used • Be greater than 8 characters • Be less than 15 characters • Contain at least one letter • Contain at least one number • Contain at least one special character • Must not contain the same character more than three times in a row • Must not contain any piece of the username anywhere in the password • Must have a gematria value that is divisible by 12.

• Must not contain an even number of consonants or vowels in months of Saturn ascending When presented with such ridiculous requirements, one can hardly be blamed for constructing the perfect password once and using it for multiple sites. The problem arises when this one password becomes compromised. It is now no longer one account that is in danger, but every website on which you might have ever used that username/password combination. The value in the leaked username and password is no longer in providing access to that particular website, but in what other websites might also use that same username-password combo. The only way to mitigate the danger posed by a password leak is to use a unique, random password for every site that you visit. Using a random, unique password provides the following benefits: • It minimizes the chance that the password will be decrypted.

• It prevents the password from providing access to other websites Once you have created a random, unique password for every website, you need a way to store them. This is where a password manager comes in.

Visio 365 viewer for mac free download. A password manager acts as a personal database of all of your passwords, allowing you to retrieve them whenever you need to login somewhere. Password managers come in all sorts of flavors. Some will simply store the passwords for you. Others will offer to generate random passwords for you as needed.