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Use of Password Managers

We live in an age where more and more aspects of our daily life are covered online, including essential and even crucial aspects such as working online, online schooling, online shopping, online banking or even filing the tax return online. As a direct consequence we all need to manage countless accounts for the different activities – every single one requiring the definition of a user name and a password.

While it’s almost hard to believe, according to several research sources (also including the National Cyber Security Centre of the UK Government) the most popular and common passwords used across the globe include “password”, “123456”, “qwerty”, “letmein” and many similar combinations…

If you take cyber security seriously, you likely already use strong passwords for your accounts, including difficult-to-guess combinations of upper and lower case characters, numbers and special characters. Still, given the large amount of different accounts we manage day-by-day, many users still can’t resist the temptation of using the exact same password for many different accounts over and over again. If this is you, you are exposing yourself to the risk of major identity theft issues if ever one of your many accounts gets hacked.

This is where Password Managers come in: easy-to-use software solutions allowing you to generate, store and manage a set of very strong passwords for the individual online accounts. With one (highly secure) master password for the password manager, these systems enable you to securely and conveniently access all the different online systems.

Several reputable password managers are available today, including 1Password, bitwarden, Dashlane, Keeper, KeyPassXC, LastPass, LogMeOnce, NordPass, RoboForm, Zoho Vault, and many others. While most of them require a (very affordable!) subscription, some of the available solutions even come for free. Also, basically all of the solutions easily work cross-platform, i.e. whether you are using Windows, MacOS, Android or iOS based devices, the password managers have you covered.

Helping you in picking the right password manager, several independent experts and editors have published well-rounded overviews and comparisons, including CNET, PCMag, TechRadar, and Tom’s Guide. Our favorites here at SmallBiz IT are LastPass (if you are willing to pay for a subscription) and bitwarden (open source, also including a great free option)…

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