Because most websites you have used in the past 15 years have been hacked at least once.
Just look at this graph:
Those were just the data breaches between 2020-2022.
You can see the complete list at the link above.
Every password you have used at any of these sites and services is now leaked and accessible to hackers.
All they need to do is find out all passwords you have ever used to pay $5-10 on an illegal Dark Web site in bitcoin, enter your name or email address and get a complete list.
It just takes 2 minutes!
And it can be done by teenagers, hackers, competitors, and close ones.
The only way to avoid someone obtaining access to your whole digital life in two minutes is to have a unique password on every site and service you uses. But it would be impossible to remember them all, especially if you follow the logical complexity requirements.
The solution?
Password Managers!
There are all kinds of password manager; learning how to use them is like learning how to use Excel. you can use almost all other spreadsheet software if you know how to use Excel. Password managers are like that – once you learn the basics, they all work similarly.
The most important thing to remember is to protect access to your password manager.
Don’t use your favourite password from your college days to protect where you will store your most critical passwords, such as the one for your online banking or your Instagram!
Our advice is to use past phrases. Select four words that are easy to remember but difficult to guess and make that your passphrase for your password manager.
Here is a comic showing what passphrases are and how to use them:
Image source: https://xkcd.com/936/
Making a passphrase easy to remember is trivial: make sure the words it consists of are emotionally charging, colourful, shocking even.
For example: “green horse on fire in the palace” is a passphrase that is easier to remember than “horse eating grass in the field” if we use the analogy from the comic above.
It is okay to split your words with a space or with “-” so you won’t ask yourself if you spaced out the words or not.
Now that we have come up with a way to select a unique, never-before-used passphrase for our password manager, it is time to learn how to use one.
It is simple really:
Let us use the example of a free and open source password manager, KeePassXC: https://keepassxc.org/
After creating a new database and saving it in a safe place (remember to back it up from time to time so you won’t lose it if you lose it if you lose your computer or it simply stops working one day), you will see the main screen.
The user interfaces in most password managers, free and paid, online and offline, are similar. There are categories of passwords (or sets of credentials), and you have your individual entries in each category.