Your email is probably hacked!

Password Managers – We are not kidding! Your email has probably been hacked already. Okay! Now that we have your attention let us start by answering a few questions. Do you use the same password on more than one website? When was the last time you changed your password? Does your password have special characters/upper case and lower case in it? Go on. Think about the questions for a moment. An average user has at least 27 online accounts, and the chances are for a lot of these accounts most of them use the same password. Why would you not? It’s comfortable and convenient. Right? Wrong!!! As mentioned in the previous article we will talk more about passwords and password managers. Also, we will dwell on why using the same password on multiple websites is risky and why we need to stop memorizing our password.
According to this article, the top 10 worst passwords of 2017 were as follows.
> 123456
> Password
> 12345678
> qwerty
> 12345
> 123456789
> letmein
> 1234567
> football
> iloveyou
Chances of any of you having one of the above passwords are nil (hopefully!). As our lives are moving more and more online, the need for having a secure password is very high. Moreover, if you use the same password on more than one website, it becomes even riskier and makes you a target for hacking.

Different Password for Different Websites

Former Internet Giant, Yahoo! was hacked in the year 2014 and almost all the accounts got compromised. All THREE Billion of them. If you are just finding out about it, please stop reading and change your Yahoo email account password. To make matters worse, the company had only disclosed this information in late 2016. This attack impacted Yahoo so much that their final sale price to Verizon dropped by $350 Million from $4.83 billion to $4.48 billion in 2017. If you have a yahoo account and use the same password on other online accounts as well, the door has already been opened for hackers to hack in and steal your data.
You might say that you are not that famous for someone to hack into your accounts or think that you don’t have anything significant for someone to steal. But in this day and age data is as good as gold for companies and it doesn’t matter whose data it is for them. The common perception is that having the same password on multiple different websites makes it easier. But it makes you more vulnerable. In this situation what can you do?

Consider using a Password Manager

If you have never heard of a password manager, it’s about time we had a chat. A password manager is a middleman who remembers all your passwords. It can store any amount of passwords that you want to save, generate secure passwords for you and also it can store critical data for you. All of this sounds good but what’s the catch you might think. The only trick is that you need to remember a master password with which you log in to the app and if you forget it, it gets damn tricky to reset it.
You might ask us this question. What if, the password manager gets hacked? Wouldn’t that be equal to keeping all of your eggs in the same basket? Well, it has happened before where hackers have tried to gain access and hack into one of the most popular password manager’s called LastPass. It was one of our recommendations in the last blog too. Why do we still suggest an app which was hacked and is probably compromised? It is true that the service got hacked but the guys who hacked it weren’t able to get anything out of the app. How is that possible you might ask?
LastPass never has access to your master password. They use encryption and hashing algorithms of the highest standard to protect user data. LastPass hashes both the username and master password on the user’s computer with 5,000 rounds of PBKDF2-SHA256, a password strengthening algorithm. That creates a key, on which we perform another round of hashing, to generate the master password authentication hash. All of this sounds very technical, and it is very technical however this is just the beginning. For an in-depth understanding, you can watch this video about hashing.

How does it work?

We felt it would be a bit better for all of you to watch a quick 5 min video which guides you through the setting up of the password manager. Since our YouTube channel is not live yet, please watch a video from another channel.

Things to remember

– Set a secure Master Password and
– Make sure you don’t use that password anywhere else.
– Don’t lose that Master Password or else you might just have to delete that account
– Don’t share the Master Password with anyone.
– Consider not clicking on “remember password” in the browser extension. You might forget the master password.
– Premium Version unlocks more features and gives you more value for your money. Use this link if you want to sign up for a premium and get one month free.

Final Thoughts:

We know change can be hard and thinking about just handing over all of our sensitive information to an app can sound terrifying. However, the benefits that follow make using the service worthwhile. If you are still not convinced, please watch this video. It might just change your opinion.

 
Image Credit: https://www.videoblocks.com/video/young-businesswoman-working-on-her-computer-in-the-office-writing-an-email-clicking-the-keyboard-and-mouse-checking-her-smartphone-racking-focus-through-the-stuff-on-the-desk-a-clerk-emailing-a-corporate-letter-and-chatting-ik2ci-8

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