574

Yesterday I got a notice from my Lastpass password manager that my overall security score was low.  How can this be? I am an IT professional!  So I started digging into why Lastpass was telling me this.  When I went into the dashboard I saw 574 passwords that were either weak or duplicated on multiple sites.  Looks like I have some work to do.

I have used Lastpass for many, many years.  It is a great way to securely store passwords without having to remember them all.  Well way back when I did have to remember them all and as a result I reused passwords a lot, a huge no no nowadays.  Not only were passwords reused, they were also weak passwords by today’s standards.  For example one I used a lot was “vball”, that’s it.  (no worries I don’t use it anymore) 🙂  So I started working on this massive list.

A large chunk of these offending sites were trimmed off quickly as they were for old sites that I either no longer need, duplicates or are out of existence entirely.  However the sites I do actually need that were on the list needed more attention.  What I did was on each site that was flagged, go in there and change my password and utilize the random password generator feature of Lastpass.  It makes a long, unique, complex password that you can use for a site.  You won’t remember it but Lastpass will.

A complex and long password makes brute forcing a password infinitely more difficult for a hacker.  Using a unique password for each and every website you visit isolates the damage if a site is breached.  If you use the same/similar password for every site, when a hacker gets a email/password leak from a breached site, the first thing they do is try those credentials on other sites.  If you use different keys for each castle, the compromise starts and ends there. I have been able so far to clear up about half of the list.  I have more work to do.  I advise you do a similar audit of your credentials.

There hasn’t been much of note on the home front the last couple days.  I still feel mostly like the road runner from the Wile E. Coyote cartoons, on the go.