Password management is a nightmare in our electronically driven world.  How do you manage your passwords?  Same password, or a minor variation?   There’s a pretty good chance that your password and username are in multiple places on the dark web.  If you watch a lot of investigative shows, you know about the dark web – and it’s not a myth.  There are so many places out there that your information is for sale to the highest bidder.

For a long time I used a password protected document with all my passwords.  That way I only had to remember a single password.   I didn’t always have access to that document, and seriously – how much more secure is that than the sticky note under my keyboard?

I have found a better way, and it’s made my life so much easier in regards to the stress of managing all your passwords.  For the last 2 years, I’ve been using a product called LastPass.  It is a cloud based application – that allows you to have one strong Master Password and stores the passwords for all of the sites and applications you access. 

You can generate strong passwords and store them securely, having them autofill for you via a browser extension (Chrome, etc) , or an app on your iPhone or Android device. 

I use the free version, but the Premium version is well worth the money if you want to share passwords with multiple people.  At some point, I will upgrade to the family version – so I can stop getting asked the password for everything…even accounts that I’m not supposed to know about :-).

And if you need an Authenticator App for sites that now require multifactor authentication, such as the IRS or the Social Security Administration – LastPass has a great one here:  LastPass MFA

If you are in the Apple universe of course you can opt to use Apple’s version of Cloud Keychain – but I am reluctant to have Apple own everything…and I still do have a Microsoft Windows laptop.

Check it out – you won’t regret it!!!