If you know all your passwords, your cybersecurity can be breached. Why? Anything that’s easy for you to remember follows a logical pattern that AI is getting better at picking up. A strong password has no logic. You must have a password manager, and you must let it generate a password for each online account.

You all know the drill by now. A strong password combines upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters in strings that generally are 12 to 16 characters long. We won’t say it’s impossible for a human being to create and remember 100 or more strong passwords. But it’s highly unlikely.

The best part of a password manager is that you only need to remember one strong master password. The downside is that if you lose or forget the password, you may not be able to access the app, or you’ll need to jump through a lot of hoops to gain access.

AI is making passwords weaker and weaker. Remember that at its core, AI is massive computing power. Anyone who tries to crack passwords can run an untold number of scenarios for as long as they need to crack a code or give up – momentarily. If you have a password that follows some kind of publicly available personal information and/or a pattern, the hacker’s computer will eventually pick it. The computer-generated password from a password manager doesn’t use any of that information, and it’s not readily machine readable.

In addition to giving you a strong password, a password manager does away with any need to reuse a password. There’s a tendency to reuse a password because you can remember it, especially if we fear it may be difficult to access the password manager. This can be true with a smartphone, where you can only view one screen at a time. However, you can copy a password from your password manager app and paste it into your smartphone’s browser.

As you all know, reusing passwords poses a significant risk if a password is cracked at one site. Again, using AI, the hacker can quickly apply the password to every website they know you access, and chances are good that they’ll get a hit and get in.

Just about any top-rated password manager works across all platforms and should give you the option to choose a family/friends subscription for personal use and a corporate subscription. It should be mandatory for everyone in your family and for all employees using corporate online accounts to have and – more important – use the password manager.

We can help you select a password manager that meets your needs and make sure that everyone in the program is properly set up. We can also make sure that everyone knows how to download their passwords and make a hard copy, which protects everyone if they lose or forget their password or if you want to change password managers. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us for an appointment.