In a world in which there is an online service for basically everything, secure passwords are incredible important. For most websites the password is the only security measure that the user can influence. That’s why it surprises my that still so many people use insecure passwords or use the same password for every website.
If you google what makes a secure password you’ll find many different recommendation. But there are two things that everyone seems to agree on. A good password needs to be:
- long
- unique
By choosing a long password you avoid that the password is cracked with a brute-force attack. A brute-force attack is a method where the attacker will just try out millions of passwords automatically, hoping that his computational resources are big enough to crack the password in a foreseeable amount of time.
But even a super long password won’t help you if the attacker got access to the password database of the website. In that case he has direct access to your account and there is nothing you can do about it. Now you can only try to limitate the damage. The hacker will try out your password on other websites as well. That’s why it’s important to never reuse the same password for different services.
But who has time to come up with a long and unique password for every website they use? And how to remember all these passwords? That’s where a password manager comes into play.