Our daily lives revolve around our passwords. With passwords, we access our bank accounts and finances. With passwords, we can log in to email accounts and communicate with coworkers, relatives, and friends.
And with passwords, we keep our personal information safe from those who are looking to steal and destroy. The problem is remembering all of those passwords. In fact, the average person has a password for over 70 different websites, apps, or devices that they use on a daily and weekly basis.
That’s a lot of information to keep track of. Wondering how to remember your passwords?
Hopefully, you aren’t one of those people who uses the same password for every single account. If so, you are the main target of hackers.
Want to know why using the same password for every account is a terrible idea? Would you like to know how you can create unique passwords that you can actually remember, to stay safe online? Keep reading to find out how.
The Importance of Strong Passwords
Picture this scenario. You open up a new bank account, which allows you to manage your finances online.
In order to access your account, you need to create a username and password. These need to be secure, so that hackers and thieves don’t figure out your login credentials and get access to your money.
Now, say you’ve created a new username and password that you feel pretty confident about. The next day, you create a new account for a completely different website.
You figure you can just use the same login credentials for your bank since they are pretty strong and no one will figure them out.
But, what if that new website gets hacked. What if someone gets information about you from this new website, such as your username and password, and then tries to go after your other accounts, like your bank account.
All of a sudden, your strong bank password isn’t so strong at all. If you are using the same password for every account on the internet, you are putting yourself at the biggest risk. The best passwords are those that are unique, long, and contain strings of letters and numbers.
Where to Use Passwords
So it’s clear that you need to use separate passwords for different websites. But those aren’t the only places you’ll use passwords. Let’s talk about the common areas you should set a password before getting into password tips.
Across the Internet
Obviously, any website that requires you to create an account will require a password to be set. This includes important websites such as your bank, your loans such as a student loan or mortgage, and healthcare-related sites.
Because so much personal information is stored on these websites, these are your top priority for using a unique, strong password.
But most people have accounts on plenty of other sites such as those related to work. Travel-related websites such as airline and hotel booking sites also store lots of information, as do online shopping sites.
The amount of websites we need an account for is staggering, but it’s simply the way the internet, and our society, functions.
On Your Computer
While websites are independent entities from your computer, you also need to use passwords locally on your hardware. For example, you should have a password enabled on your computer that prevents anyone from using your computer without the password.
Your computer likely contains tons of personal and sensitive information, such as receipts, digital tax returns, and so forth.
Aside from password protecting your computer itself, you should also password protect a folder that contains any sensitive information like tax returns or research projects. If you leave your computer open at work, you wouldn’t want anyone to snoop at your personal information
Phone and Apps
Because we are growing increasingly more dependent on our mobile devices, they too contain tons of personal information. Plus, we use our phones to often connect to bank accounts, money sending apps, email accounts, and much more.
This means you should use a password on your phone’s home screen to prevent anyone from using your phone at all. It should also have a password in order to open any settings or sensitive apps.
How to Remember Your Passwords
As you can see, there’s a lot of passwords you rely on on a regular basis. Remembering passwords gets very challenging when you want to use unique passwords for every application.
Wondering how to keep track of passwords so you can make them all unique? The best way is to use software to do this for you.
Password Managers on the Internet
If you use Google Chrome, one of the most common browser extensions to use is called LastPass. Basically, it allows you to set one master password that you use to log in to LastPass. When logged in, you can then add each password for every single website you create an account for, so that you can keep track of all your unique passwords.
It’s super easy to use and won’t cause any hassle. When you visit a website, it will ask if you want to use your saved LastPass login credentials. Now, you only need to remember one password, yet you can save hundreds of unique, strong passwords the easy way.
Password Management Software
What about apps or computer passwords that won’t work with a browser extension? Should you be writing passwords down? Nope, that’s totally unnecessary.
There are many different types of password management software that can be used across all of your devices. So if you’d like to keep all your passwords from the internet, your computer, your smartphone, and your tablet all under one password manager, you can do so.
All you have to do is create an extremely strong, unique master password that you can remember. If you can’t remember it, you’re out of luck.
You can try creating a random sequence of words, such as Savory Fellow Juniper Piechart, adding on a string of numbers at the end for a long, difficult-to-crack password, yet easy enough to remember.
One Password to Rule Them All
It’s widely agreed upon that using long, difficult, unique passwords for every account is best for tech and internet users. One of the best ways of managing this is by using password management software that only requires you to remember a single password.
Now that you know how to remember your passwords, it’s time to set up your secure life online. Looking for other tips and tricks like this? Be sure to check out the rest of our blog today.