Do you know that the weakest point in any security for your online accounts tends to be your password? At WordPress.com, we go to great lengths to ensure that your content is completely secure, protected, and can’t be accessed by anyone but you. But if there is someone else able to guess or retrieve your password, they bypass almost every available security measure because WordPress.com may see this person as you. Then, they could make any changes they want to your WordPress.com blog or account including the deletion of your content unfortunately.
To keep you away from this scenario, this guide will help you generate strong passwords that are considered hard to guess or crack. In this guide, we will take a look at How to manage a Password Manager to help you know more deeply about this topic.
To manage a Password Manager
A fact about traditional passwords
Password-cracking techniques, have always matured very quickly and remarkably in the past few decades, but the way we generate our passwords has not kept pace, unfortunately. As a consequence, the most common advice you could hear about generating a strong password today seems to be outdated and impractical.
In fact, a password created with that advice, like hy#bkaTpncOU, appears to be easy for any computer to break and hard for a human being to remember and type. The latest and most effective kinds of password attacks can try out up to 350 billion guesses per second, and that number will undoubtedly increase considerably over the next few years.
It is clear to be seen that creating a strong password today requires modern techniques, and we’ll tell you one of them in the next section.
Best Method: Password Manager
A password manager is a software application on your computer (or even on mobile device) that can generate very strong passwords and stores them in a definitely secure database. You employ a single passphrase to access the database, and then the manager will automatically enter your username and password into a website’s login form for you. Because you just have to remember one password only, you have the right to make it as random and as hard to guess as you want.
You never have to worry about choosing a strong password, remembering it, or typing it. This must be the easiest and most secure method available today, and we highly recommend that you use it.
How to use a Password Manager
You are able to choose one from many manager applications thanks to the fact that they are a wide range of types. Then, you can install it on your computer. These are some general steps, but you may want to check the documentation for your specific application for more details.
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Step 1: Pick a password manager. Some popular ones are:
- 1Password (closed-source, commercial)
- LastPass (closed-source, free/commercial)
- Dashlane (closed-source, free/commercial)
- KeePass (open source, free)
- RoboForm (closed-source, commercial).
- You can use your favorite search engine to find even more choices.
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Step 2: Install it on your computer.
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Step 3: Install any extensions or plugins for the web browser(s) you use.
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Step 4: Generate a strong master password to open the password database.
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Step 5: (optional) Write down the master password, and store it in a location which is safe, like a safe-deposit box or a locked safe. It’s necessary to have a backup in case you forget the master password.
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Step 6: (optional) Share your password database across multiple devices with the application’s built-in tools or via a service. In case you use an external service, make sure that you have a strong password for it and enable two-factor authentication on the account (if possible).
Now you can start to generate strong passwords with your password manager setup. Look for your manager’s built-in password-generation tool, and modify it to generate from 30 to 50 random characters, including upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and of course, symbols.
Conclusion
There are many different ways to create a strong password, but password managers, however, are considered the best. Choose the one that works for you, and then read its corresponding section further along in this article to learn how to get started.