“Password managers are essential for everyone,” says Rachel Tobac, CEO of the cybersecurity company SocialProof Security. And considering that many password managers offer free versions, there’s really no excuse not to have one. According to the security experts we consulted, it’s the best option for protecting everything from financial data to drugstore loyalty accounts. The manager safely stores all of your other passwords for you, often allowing you to access your passwords from any computer, tablet, or phone. With a password manager, however, you only need to remember one master password. This made for a tough password to crack, with one downside: It was an equally tough password to remember.
Eventually, the instructions were to come up with seemingly random strings of characters, numbers, and symbols. Instead, we were told to use assortments of words and numbers - until that wasn’t hard enough, either. That’s just too easy to crack, security experts say. The days of using your first child’s name and birth date for all your passwords are long gone.
