Think your browser’s password manager is safe? Think again.
It’s so easy to click and save your passwords right to Chrome, Edge, Safari or any other browser. Have you ever stopped to think about just how bad an idea it is to do this? Anyone with access to your browser can jump right into any one of your accounts. Yup, even your banking and investment accounts are up for grabs.
Google and Apple have free, built-in password managers. But do you really want a company that makes money collecting and selling data to be the one protecting your most sensitive info?
Then there’s one-password syndrome
I bet you’re reusing passwords or have done this in the past. Reusing passwords is a cybersecurity disaster, and one I’ve warned you about for decades. Hackers love you. A shocking 81% of hacking-related breaches start with weak or stolen passwords.
- Credential stuffing: Hackers take a leaked password and try to sign into thousands of sites per second. If you reused the login, they’ll find it.
- Dark Web sales: One criminal steals your passwords, then sells them to lots of others for fraud and identity theft.
- Financial risk: Your banking info and credit card are tied to more accounts than you realize. Identity theft and financial fraud takes years to stop, and you’ll never get all that money back.
The right way to protect your accounts
✅ Use a dedicated password manager. You want one with military-grade encryption, so even if hackers breach your device, they can’t access your stored passwords. Steer clear of free options. Those are almost always a scam.
✅ Don’t be sloppy. Say it with me: Every single account, every login and every app gets its own strong, unique password that’s at least 16 characters long, with a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers. A good password manager does it for you and autofills across all your devices because you won’t remember a hard-to-crack password.
✅ Be smart when you update. Don’t just change a letter, character or number at the end of your current password and call it good. Sure, that makes it easy to remember, but it’s not hard for someone to figure out your pattern and crack your new logins.
✅ They know your tricks. Adding an exclamation point or question mark at the end of a password doesn’t do much to stop hackers and their software from figuring it out. Use numbers and special characters in a password. Replace an O (the letter) with a zero, like this k0mand0_scholar or an A with an @ like kom@ndo_f@n.
✅ Try a passphrase. They are longer and harder to crack. Mix in some characters and numbers. “My two cats are smart” becomes “my2c@tsrSmart.”
✅ Share the right way. Sending a password in a DM or text is dangerous. A password manager lets you share a login in its encrypted form instead of plain text anyone can read. Pro tip: If you ever do share a password in a message in a pinch, delete it after the other person has copied it down.
There are so many options out there
I went looking for the very best for you. My password manager recommendation, NordPass, is built with tech called zero-knowledge encryption. You set a master password, and everything stored in your vault is for your eyes only. Even NordPass can’t access it, only you can.
I love that NordPass’s exclusive data breach scanner shows if any of your credentials have been exposed on the Dark Web. It helps you move fast because criminals do, too. With secure password sharing, breach detection and autofill capabilities, NordPass makes managing your logins easy and so much safer.
If you haven’t started using a password manager yet, now’s the time. NordPass is my go-to for keeping everything safe and organized, and I negotiated a special deal just for you.
✅ Right now, get NordPass for only $1.24 a month.* When you sign up for two years, you get an extra three months free, too. Nice.
Tags: Apple, cybersecurity, encryption, Google, hackers
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