The importance of cybersecurity cannot be overstated, staying safe online is absolutely critical – especially as we now are definitely shifting towards cloud working. But who can remember all of those passwords? All different, with at least 12 characters, an upper case letter, number, special character? It would seem that sometimes it’s just easier to have all your passwords set to “password” and be done with it – after all, no one’s going to hack into your emails, right? That only happens to banks and governments agencies…doesn’t it?
The Federation of Small Businesses suggests smaller firms are collectively attacked seven million times per year, costing the UK economy an estimated £5.26 billion ( Read the full report Cyber Resilience: How to protect small firms in the digital economy) .
Having a strong password is one of the easiest things to do, but one that many businesses ignore – and mostly, it’s because they think it’s too much hassle. But it doesn’t have to be – if fact, strong passwords could actually be far easier for you to remember than you’d think, much easier than that one that you keep having to check in the back of your diary for…you know the one I mean.
You see, through 20 years of effort, the industry has successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.
And in part, that’s because of confusion between complexity and entropy (or randomness). In the example above, you see a familiar scene – a word with added numbers, punctuation maybe even an upper case letter – but this makes it hard to remember, and surprisingly easy to guess. If we change this to entropy and start thinking about passwords LIKE correcthorsebatterystaple (don’t actually use this password now), then you see that it’s much more difficult to guess (around 550 years more difficult).
But what if we can make it EVEN EASIER? What is there was a system that will generate, securely store and allow you to retrieve whenever you need, all of your super-strong passwords? That’s really what LastPass does.
Not only that, but if you install its awesome extension into your browser, but it will even detect which website you’re on, and fill in your username and password for you when you need to log on!
To keep things super secure, LastPass needs you to have a really strong password (and one that you’re likely to remember), so correcthorsebatterystable it is (seriously, think of something else)! Using this password, we can keep all of our other details safely tucked up in our vault. New passwords can be generated by LastPass that are massive in length, giving us complexity AND entropy – keeping you even safer online, and LastPass will pop these into your websites for you.
Won’t that mean that all my passwords are just sat there for someone to read?
If someone were to access your computer, they would need your master password to access the vault – so you’re not putting all of your passwords eggs in one basket. You can (read: should) additionally secure your account with two-step verification so someone would need your username, password AND a key in order to log in.
So it keeps you super safe and removes all of the hassles of having to remember multiple passwords (and even usernames).
Are there mobile apps for LastPass too?
Absolutely, and I’ve put together the most common here, Apple (iOS), Android and Windows Phone – so have a play to your heart’s content and get yourself super-safe.
So if you feel you or your business could be safer online – start by checking out LastPass and see what you think.
