Password Managers

Using a password manager to store all your various passwords for accounts has many benefits. It stores the passwords securely and only needs you to remember a single master password to access the rest. This eliminates the need to remember multiple login credentials or write them down somewhere. Instead, the password manager automatically fills in your login credentials for you, saving you time and effort. 

 

The main benefit is improved cyber security. A password manager can help generate strong, unique passwords for each of your online accounts and stores them securely. This helps prevent hackers from accessing your accounts using weak or reused passwords. Additionally, password managers use encryption to keep your data secure, so even if a hacker were to access your password manager data they wouldn’t be able to read your passwords.

 

Password hygiene is crucial to maintain the security of your online accounts. However, many people use weak passwords or reuse the same password across multiple accounts. A password manager can help you improve your password hygiene by generating strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts. This reduces the risk of your accounts being compromised due to weak or reused passwords. Other benefits can include checking stored passwords against known breaches, with an alert being generated to let you know to change the affected password.
Your password manager can autofill the login page for websites making it a simple experience to get logged into all your accounts with them all using their own individual passwords.  

 

It can also protect against phishing attacks where a link to a similar looking webpage is accessed. An email could contain a link to a malicious website that has been cloned to look like the real one, for example Office 365 login page. The password manager knows that it isn’t the real page that you have a login saved for and won’t prefill the login boxes. These pages can have similar looking URLs to the real sites with a single character changed or swapped. In this instance you should manually type the URL you require. 

 

Browsers have password managers built in and can be secured with a master password to access them. They should only be used with devices that are used exclusively by yourself. Shared computers you shouldn’t save any passwords to the browser. There are also dedicated applications, such as Bitwarden, NordPass, and KeePass for example that can manage your passwords directly out with any browser. 

 

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/top-tips-for-staying-secure-online/password-managers  

https://bitwarden.com/blog/how-password-managers-help-prevent-phishing/