Today, passwords are a necessity of our online life, and they are cumbersome to remember. We are all familiar with the reasons for strong passwords and the suggestions for maintaining these passwords - 8 or more characters, a variety of letters, numbers and special characters, and mixed case.  And, most importantly, use a different password for every application and web site.  Who can remember all these passwords?!

Fortunately, password management software (“password managers”) has evolved into an incredibly useful application for both your personal passwords and your business passwords.  These password managers will recognize websites that you have previously visited and autofill your username and password.  This has several advantages: you do not need to remember or even see your password for the web site; and this allows you to have the password manager generate long, random passwords making your passwords harder to hack.

Another advantage that may not be as obvious, when the web site address that you are visiting has been spoofed, the password manager will not recognize the web site and will not fill in your credentials.  This adds another security layer, protecting you from bad links in spam e-mail.

In the corporate environment, consider password manager software that allows you to share access to the password manager with your co-workers.  This is an incredibly efficient method of maintaining passwords.  Passwords can be arranged in groups and co-workers can be granted access to only the groups containing the passwords that they may need. 

When an employee leaves the company, use the password manager to determine which passwords the former employee had access to and change those passwords. Because passwords are referenced directly from the software via autofill or copy/paste, co-workers will not need to be notified when passwords are changed.

The right password manager for you is determined by the features that you will need.  Some password managers have apps that allow you to access your passwords on multiple devices, including your mobile devices. Most password managers allow you to save information in addition to your passwords, for example, you may save your family’s social security numbers, insurance information, tax id numbers or other sensitive information that you may need to access.

Increase your security by implementing a strong password policy using a password manager and never have to provide the updated WIFI password again!