Hikvision Cybersecurity Director Discusses Password Management Strategies, Using Password Managers to Reduce Security Concerns
In our recent blog, Hikvision discussed the challenge of creating complex passwords and provided three rules for creating good ones to reduce security concerns and hacking risks.
In that blog, we talked about how we all hate passwords and how the cybersecurity wonks tell us that we have to do unreasonable things like:
Today we are going to explore how you can achieve this and actually make your digital life more secure and much easier than when you had to remember all of those passwords or look them up on a spreadsheet on your computer’s desktop. Welcome the Password Manager!
First, we’ll look at an overview of common password management strategies below, then discuss password managers as a tool in more detail.
Below are some of the common password management strategies that people use today:
A Password Manager is a software tool that is used to store all of your passwords in an encrypted file so that you, and no one else, have very easy access to them, helping to minimize security concerns. Most modern password managers have additional features such as cloud storage, auto-filling fields, and password generators that make very good passwords.
The cloud storage feature of password managers provides easy access to your passwords from different devices. While it sounds scary to have all of your passwords stored online, a good password manager will encrypt all of your password data before it is uploaded to the cloud and will make sure that only you have the keys (the master password that you set) to decrypt your passwords on each device. All of this security is great unless you forget your master password. In that case, you would lose everything.
The autofill feature is convenient because when you go to a site, such as LinkedIn, the password manager’s browser plugin recognizes the URL and sees the username and password fields then enters your username and password automatically. This is not only convenient, but it also helps defend against keystroke login malware, that could learn and share your passwords. It also ensures that your username and password are not entered into a doppelgänger domain website, like 1inkedin.com rather than LinkedIn.com. This feature has however been abused and used for some creative attacks. By hiding the username/password fields on a web page that are not viewable by the person visiting that page, some attackers have been able to harvest account credentials. This Wired article goes into greater detail about this type of attack.
The password generator is a very important part of this whole solution. The password manager can’t help you much if you create simple passwords such as 12345678 or monkey123. So, the password manager will recommend passwords for you and if you accept them when creating an account, it will automatically store that in your password manager. For example, here is a screenshot from the password generator in LastPass. You can see that it is 24 characters and is using all four-character sets (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters) to create a difficult password to guess and a nearly impossible password to remember. Good thing you don’t need to remember this password!
There is certainly debate over the problems with password managers: What if you forget your master password, or what if someone gets your master password and uses it to hack your account? These are valid questions, however, with the rapid growth of account compromises and data security breaches, the risk seems far greater for someone is using simple passwords and trying to remember them or reusing those passwords on multiple accounts.
Here are a few articles that compare and contrast the leading password managers.
In closing, I’ll say that password managers will greatly help to secure your accounts, but are they enough? In the next blog post about passwords, I’ll explain Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and how and why you should use it almost everywhere you can.
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