The trade off with using a password manager.

Companies running websites, or apps, sometimes get hacked, and when that happens a list of user accounts and their passwords can leak onto the internet.

If your information is in there, and the password you've used on the account is the same or similar to the one used in your work emails you're in trouble.

Hacking is often seen as this mysterious dark art, but the reality is, loads of attacks are simply the results of someone buying a list off the dark web containing your password.

To protect against this you can do two things. The first is MFA, which we've covered in another video, go and look that up if you haven't seen it already.

The second, is to use a unique password for every website. Obviously that's going to be a challenge to keep on top of... It's not reasonable for a person to remember hundreds of different passwords to hundreds of different websites. So that's where password managers come in.

My password manager, generates a long string of random characters and saves them for every site I've got a login for. This means if one of the services I'm using leaks that password, I've only got one problem, and not hundreds of accounts potentially at risk.

Now the trade off here is that if someone were to get the password to my password manager, they'd literally have the keys to my online life, it would be really bad.

Cyber security is all about balance though, and weighing it up, the benefit of keeping my accounts isolated from one another is greater than the risk posed by my password manager being breached.

There's also steps you can take to further mitigate the risk. Rotating your master password regularly, using a long passphrase rather than your dogs name, or even using Single Sign On, which allows the account to be locked down at the slightest sniff of trouble.

If you'd like to understand more about password managers, and how to use them responsibly, please get in touch, it's one of those nerdy topics I really enjoy discussing.