Steve Dotto here and today, I want to take on one of the real challenges we face online,
and that is protecting our security, specifically managing our passwords.
Now I know, this is something that we don’t like to talk about.
The reason is we all feel more than a little guilty about our password strategy.
Why do we feel guilty?
Typically, we feel guilty because our passwords strategies tend to suck.
What we do is we take one password that we think is fairly secure, at least this is what
I’ve done, and then I add some extra digits at the end of it depending on what account
I am going into.
So I basically have the same password.
Those of us who are a little more sophisticated may have multiple passwords but then we tend
to store them somewhere in our address book, in Evernote, or maybe on a little sticky stuck
to the side of our monitor.
None of these methods of security are really what we would refer to as secure but we still
do them.
Why do we do them?
Because the option of having really nice, long cryptic passwords is just impossible
for us to manage ourselves.
That’s the nature of passwords and multiple accounts online.
What should we do?
Well, there are some great password management tools that are available to us online.
I think the main reason most of us haven’t engaged in those up to this point is because:
a) We’re not too sure how they work, we’re not too sure how much of a time investment,
we’re not too sure how efficient, and we’re really afraid that they will screw something
up and stop us from getting into some accounts by losing our passwords or making something
that we can’t possibly get into.
That’s one issue we have.
The other issue we have is frankly cost.
One of the best tools on the market is called 1Password.
I love this tool, very well-designed, elegant interface, really effective, and it works
on just about any type of technology that you can imagine, from Macintosh to Android,
iPhones, iPods, touches, it works on them all, but the problem with it is it tends to
be a little expensive.
It’s especially expensive if you don’t really know well a password manager is going
to work for you.
A lot of us are afraid to drop $40, $50, $60, or even $100 on an app that we’re not too
sure how well it’s going to work.
After all, our own password strategy has worked pretty well up to now, hasn’t it?
I mean, we haven’t been hacked, have we?
But the recent news, the issues that Linkedin has just had and months ago that Sony had,
that should be a wake-up call for us all that we should probably deal with our passwords.
Let’s deal with them today.
I found a tool that just might break the log jam for you.
It’s called LastPass.
This is a free tool.
What LastPass does is it stores all of our passwords in a master account.
So we create one really good account and then we store all of our passwords in it.
It stores them on the Cloud in a very secure environment on the internet.
The danger, of course, is the fact it’s on the internet.
Theoretically, it might be less secure.
I don’t think that’s all that big an issue.
The advantages really outweigh the disadvantages because it’s stored on the Cloud, it means
that we can access it from any our devices, our computer, our handheld, our mobility devices
could all access our passwords from the same accounts since we want to access them with
different tools at different times.
Let me show you how it works.
When you visit the LastPass site, you are given the opportunity to download it.
Now, you should start this whole process from your main computer, from whatever computer
you’re on and not from one of your mobility devices.
The nice thing about LastPass is that it’s free.
We can try it out and make sure that it works for us.
It doesn’t need a big investment.
There is an actual Premium version and you pay $1 a month but that is if you decide you
want to use it on your iPhone.
That’s an outrageous sum, I know, for the iPhone but if you do have an iPhone, you’ll
probably end up wanting to use it on your iPhone.
A dollar a month is pretty good value, I would say.
Now, what happens when you open an account and download it is you are brought into a
user interface that allows you to first of all, create your account.
You do that based on your email address and it’s going to store, as I said, all the
information on the Cloud.
The very first thing that happens is that it installs a plug-in in whatever browser
of choice that you’re logged on with.
In my case, it was Chrome.
It installs a plug-in because it allows me to access all the passwords through a plug-in
in Chrome.
At the very beginning, this might be a little frustrating for some people because what happens
is, it’s going to look through your computer and find all the existing and open passwords
that’s you have on your computer.
You don’t think you have any open passwords on your computer?
Well be prepared to be shocked because every time you saved your password on your web browser,
where it said, “Do you want us to save the password for you?” and you said yes, that’s
an open password as far as LastPass is concerned.
It’s going to now create new log-ins for each of those.
It will create some spurious log-ins as well and it’s not its fault.
It’s your fault because all those times that you entered the password wrong or put
in the wrong username and then told whatever web browser it was to save it, that becomes
a new account log in.
It doesn’t know that it’s not real so it saves all those as well.
As you can see, I had to import and say, okay, okay, okay, okay.
You’ll click on that for a good five or six minutes while importing them all.
We can then clean them out through a little check box interface at the very end of the
whole process or as you’re going through and using the software a little bit later
on, you can just clean up your account and delete those extra log ins.
They don’t really affect the performance at all but they are irritating to look at,
I think.
Once you’ve completed that process, you’re then going to choose how you’re going to
set up your system as far as autofilling in forms.
This is a benefit to us because it already adds to our productivity.
What will happen is if you put in your account information and log in information, your address,
your phone number, your mail address, even your bank account or credit card information
if you decide to store those within your account, you can then use them to autofill.
You don’t have to keep going back to your wallet to look up your credit card number,
you can autofill.
You can base that on your master password as well so it doesn’t automatically fill
in.
So you’ve got several layers of security there but that is a real convenience for you
as you go along.
Of course, you can have multiple profiles as well.
You can have one profile for one credit card and another for another.
You can have a business profile and a personal profile.
You can set things up the way that you want them.
As you use the software, it will become a lot more clear to you how you want to actually
utilize the software as you go ahead.
Once you’ve done all of that, it’s installed and it’s in your system.
Once you’ve completed the installation process, now LastPass is installed in your browser.
We can see that I have access to it on the Menu bar.
Depending on which browser you have, it will install in a different area and the browser
might look slightly different but you have the same basic tools allowing you to manage
your LastPass account from here.
Next stage that you have to do is to try it out and go into any of your consoles.
Let me go into my website and watch what happens.
This is the management console for my website.
Now normally what happens is I’d have to log in but as you can see it has already logged
me in to the management area of my website.
It did it automatically.
The nice thing is when you import all of the addresses that come in from your web browser,
you can still log in to all of the accounts that you want to.
But here’s where we want to start changing things up a bit from the way that we’ve
historically done things.
LastPass will now allow us to start changing our passwords in each of our different accounts
and this is the process that I really want you to engage in.
LastPass will generate really nice cryptic passwords for each of your accounts.
Over the next little while, you need to discipline yourself so that when you go into your bank
account, your Linkedin account, your Facebook account, you want to go into your account
management area and change the password for each of those accounts, and then allow LastPass
to come up with a nice cryptic password that is almost impossible to hack.
That’s how we really start to build a really nice level of security.
Of course, we do have one master password that we’ve created that allows us to get
into the account and we should change that every few months ourselves as well.
Don’t rely on just one as we go.
That’s the only weak point in the whole chain now because every one of your accounts
now will have a unique password of its own.
If one was compromised, you don’t compromise more of your accounts because you have the
same password or something close to the same password in each of those other accounts.
Once you’ve started to update all of the accounts that you use on the internet, then
you should start installing it in your other devices as well because LastPass will also
install on multiple computers and multiple browsers within the same computer.
It’s free so it doesn’t really matter.
So I access my accounts from sometimes Safari.
Sometimes, I do it from Chrome.
I use different browsers for different things.
We have to repeat the same process of visiting the LastPass website and then downloading
the appropriate plug-in for the browser that we’re using at that time.
Once we’ve done that, we just log in again with LastPass and we’re off to the races,
able to access all of those accounts.
That brings us to the next level which is, let’s start installing them on our other
devices.
Now I installed it on my iPad and I was a little bit surprised here.
There are a couple of ways that you can do it.
You can just visit the app store and download the app or you can tell them on the website
I want to install it on the iPad and it will send you a link to install it on your iPad.
But when I installed it on my iPad, I found that they actually have their own LastPass
browser which is a tabbed browser that replaces Safari while you’re browsing the web on
your iPad.
Now some people might not appreciate it that much.
It’s not the way that they might choose to use their iPads so this might be a stop
for some people.
There is a way of installing little web applets into Safari on the iPad but that’s not the
preferred way as far as the folks at LastPass are concerned.
They think that you should use their secure browser.
I find it’s pretty easy to use.
I’m happy to use it for most of my browsing so for me, it’s fine to use the LastPass
browser but it will be a little bit of a surprise for some people.
The work around it is a little bit clunky at the beginning.
I’m not going to show it to you right now.
They’ve got plenty of documentation on their website about how to do that.
If it’s important for you to continue using Safari while you’re on your iPad, then you’re
going to want to check that out.
Once you’ve installed it on your iPad or your other mobility device, you can then log
on with that device and it again accesses all of your accounts.
Going back to the LastPass website, we’ll see all the different places that we can install
LastPass and it pretty much covers the gamut.
It’ll work in Windows, Mac, Linux, all of the main web browsers including Internet Explorer,
Firefox and even Opera are covered.
Even HP’s webOS, which nobody is really using much anymore is covered.
Of course, the iPhone’s iOS, Symbian, Android, very important, and Blackberry for those of
you who are still using the Blackberry on your mobile devices or your Blackberry tablet.
It works on all of those devices and it’s free in all of those environments so it’s
pretty good value there, as far as we’re concerned.
The only place that we pay when we use it, as I said, is on the iPhone.
The key here is to basically change your philosophy about passwords.
Accepting the fact that you’re not going to be able to memorize them, you have to find
a tool that works for you.
If you don’t want to use LastPass then by all means, one password or there’s several
other tools out there as well.
But try these tools out.
Get one.
Embrace it.
Start to use it.
Once you’ve started to use it, don’t just leave your passwords the same as they are
now.
Go through and have the discipline of entering each of your accounts over time and modifying
those passwords to the more cryptic passwords that are auto-generated by your system.
You will then have increased your layers of security substantially.
Does it mean that you’re bulletproof and nobody can ever hack or steal any of your
personal information?
Absolutely not.
But you’ve done what is reasonable to do to help protect yourself.
That’s really your responsibility.
Nobody else is going to do this for you.
As you can see, it’s really not that hard a process.
I hope that you found this video useful.
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I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for visiting us today.