Cybersecurity Tips - Using Password Managers to Secure Your Information

Hi, everyone. Craig Sixta with Element Technologies here with another weekly cybersecurity tip. Before we start, let me thank Rick Hannam with WatchGuard technologies for the excellent webinar on how to work securely from home that we did last week. If you didn't have a chance to see it, definitely check out Element Technologies' LinkedIn page and scroll down. While you're there, do make sure that you follow the page so you get updates for when we do post new videos. One of the things that Rick shared during this security seminar was a stat from statistica.com that said that 6% of users use the same password for all of their sites. Even more concerning, 85% of internet users use a variation of one or two different passwords for all of their sites. We have to do better than that. MFA does an excellent job protecting us, but we still need to have good passwords.

Password Manager - LastPass Explained

For that reason, today I want to talk about a program called LastPass. Normally on these tips, I don't recommend specific products, but there are so many password management tools out there that it can often be overwhelming. LastPass is the one that I've settled on for a number of reasons that I won't get into on this video, but it is a highly secure platform. The first thing that I will say about it though, is when you use LastPass, there is an option to turn on multi-factor authentication. If you're not going to use multi-factor authentication, it's a terrible idea to store all of your passwords in one place. But if you're doing that, LastPass is a great solution. So, let's take a look. 

How to Use Last Pass for More SecurePasswords

The first thing we’re going to want to do is download the LastPass extension into Google Chrome. You can also find it for Firefox, Microsoft Edge, other browsers, but I'm using Chrome today, so let's do that. The first thing you're going to want to do is search for Chrome extensions. Open up the Chrome Web Store and in here just search for LastPass. Make sure you're getting the right one; the odds are slim that you'd get the wrong one but, this one—obviously highly rated, many reviews—let's add that to Chrome. Now that you've added it to Chrome, the next thing you're going to want to do is either log in if you have an account or create a new account. We're going to create a new account here quick. You're going to want to create a very strong password for this because this is really the keys to the kingdom. If somebody gets their hands on the password, they're partway in. They should not be all the way in, because you should also be adding multi-factor authentication. That's all there is to it.

So, next thing is, we're now on the Amazon web page. I'm going to log in to Amazon. I have to enter in an email address, and I have to enter in my password. And once I've done that, you notice my browser's asking me, "Do I want to save?" Absolutely not, but I do want to save it into LastPass. Please do not use your browser to save passwords, and if you've already done that, I'd recommend you go into your browser settings and remove that. And now I'm into Amazon for the first time. So, that's the first time I've logged into Amazon. That's the same as every time. But now let's look at the next time that we log into Amazon. I'm going to sign out, click sign in, and you'll notice that I have this option on the right side. This is actually LastPass giving me the option to log in as my user. I just click on that, I choose sign in. If you have multiple users, you're going to have multiple options there to choose; it's really that simple. The second thing that I want to show you on LastPass—it's an amazing feature. I only have one site in here. As we said earlier, the average person has 90 sites. When I last ran this on my LastPass, I had about 350 sites that I was protecting.

Understanding How Secure Your Password Is, or Isn’t

One of the neat things that you can do is go to account options and then there's a security challenge. I highly recommend if you've been using LastPass for a while or if you have most of your passwords in, run this. And what it will do is it will show you how you're doing on your usernames and passwords. It will do a dark web basic scan. This is not as advanced as some scans, but will look for known data breaches to see if your email address was involved in those. Then when we click continue on that, I've got phenomenal scores. Which, I should have phenomenal scores considering I've got one password in there, and it was one that I just created. But you'll notice you have steps to improve your scores here: as far as changing compromised passwords, weak ones, reuse, or old passwords. Now the only thing I would caveat on this with old passwords is, if you're using multi-factor authentication, there's not nearly the need to change passwords as frequently as it used to be. I've got some passwords that are a number of years old that I'm not concerned about. Take that one with a grain of salt, but otherwise, you've got all these statistics on what you need to do to improve your security score and this can be very useful, especially as you build up your history in LastPass. That's highly recommended.

How to Securely Share Access to Your Passwords

The last thing I wanted to show you today is how to give others access to your LastPass should there be an emergency. And to do that, click on the LastPass extension, choose to open your vault. In the bottom left, you have emergency access; choose to give emergency access. Now, this is a premium feature. Premium is $3 a month or $36 a year, or you can have your entire family on it for $48 a year. I would recommend that. It's a great way to share passwords; it gives you a few more features. But when you enable this, what you're doing is, you set a timeframe. You may choose your spouse and say that if they request access to my last pass account and I don't respond and deny it in 30 days, your LastPass information is added into their account. This is something that has proved essential in a number of situations when people have unfortunately passed away or there's been a situation where we needed to get to information and it no longer existed or there was no way to get to the master password. I highly recommend you set this up.

So, that's LastPass. Hopefully you found that helpful. Definitely let us know if you want more information on that or if you have any great ideas of your own. Check out our other videos on our site as we’re constantly talking about new tips and tricks to a more secure work from home experience.

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How To Create Unique, Complex Passwords

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Six Ways to Prevent Cyberattacks