Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
Well if the truth be known, I’m a wee tad bit frustrated that I’m doing this type
of a demo again but I’ve been reading new stories that people’s password protocols
still suck.
Apparently, the worst passwords of 2014 were pretty much the same passwords as people were
using in 2013.
The #1 worst password was again 1234456.
Brilliant, if you’re using that.
Second most popular was the word “password” as your password and it goes on and on with
poor password management.
Here’s the challenge that we face.
If you’ve got your accounts and you got poor passwords, the same password being repeated
or a weak password, the challenge that we have is a) almost all of our accounts is attached
to our email address.
That’s our account names so it’s very easy to identify us because of that, either
that or say our Facebook profile.
If we’ve got a week password and one of the accounts that we’re dealing with gets
compromised then they’ve got access to not only our password but also our username, which
probably translates into multiple other accounts, meaning they can get access to other information.
That alone should scare the pants off you but when you add to the fact that most breeches
occurs and the company is not aware that breaches occurred for weeks or even months until after
it’s happened and then they let us know about it, there’s going to be a period of
maybe several months that people have access to everything about you and you don’t know
anything about it.
That puts you at risk and it also put your employer, and you friends and your family
at risk as well because information coming from you to them, they believe is trusted
information, coming from a trusted source.
They don’t realize how poor your password protection is.
Consequently, you’re putting everybody at risk.
It’s a huge issue and it’s something that we should do something about and it’s not
that difficult to do something about it.
I’ve showed you in the past setting up LastPass, which is the password manager that I use.
It’s a little bit difficult to use in some ways for some people.
It takes some getting used to.
So I discovered recently another password manager, which is kind of in the same vein
as LastPass but maybe a little bit easier to use.
It’s called Dashlane and it’s also very inexpensive.
One thing I like about LastPass is what a bargain it is for the price.
So I installed Dashlane on my system as well and I’m just going to take you through some
of the top-level things to try and get you to understand how effective and easy this
is for you to use, what the benefits might be and see if we can’t get you moving in
the direction of one of these or another password manager.
So once again today on DottoTech, it’s password managers.
I know I’m starting to sound like a little bit of a grumpy bear because I keep coming
back to the same issue.
Do I sound crabby, as it is?
It’s because since back then from the days of my TV show I’ve been harping on effective
password management for people and we know that in a lot of cases, I’ll just keep on
fighting the good fight and hope that people eventually get it.
So I’ve got this new one called Dashlane installed which I want to show you.
Now you can go visit Dashlane.com.
You see a lot of ads.
They’ve been running a lot of ads for it lately.
It’s a nice, simple password manager but the key to it is it’s cross-platform.
We basically can set up the same account and use it on our computers, notebooks and on
our mobile devices, which is essential.
Once again for the most part, you’re going to be using it through your browser or through
your mobile device.
So let me just talk you through the basic set up because setting it up is I think where
a lot of people stop and they don’t kind of move ahead.
They’re kind of afraid to do that first click and kind of get into the process.
You can start with a free account.
You can upgrade to premium at any point and the premium service costs $40 a year in this
case.
It’s a little bit more than I paid for LastPass but still really reasonable dollars, especially
when you consider some of the other password managers cost.
So for the free version, you get the free password manager which is a piece of software
that installs on your desktop but also there are extensions that are installed on your
browsers because that’s where you use it the most.
They’ve got your auto-fill feature, a nice digital wallet which should help you in the
e-commerce world, storing your credit cards and making it more convenient and it works
with all the platforms.
What you don’t get is mainly you don’t get to sync across your platforms.
This is the big one right here.
You don’t get a backup which might be a big deal, but a bigger deal I think is the
fact that you don’t get to sync it with your smartphones, etc.
It’s really just for the desktop but it will give you an idea of how it works.
You can play with it and use it for a little bit.
You can even install LastPass, play with that and then decide which one you actually want
to move into when you move it over to mobility.
One of the cool things about Dashlane which I really like is the ability to share passwords.
They’ve got an enterprise or a team version, which might be really useful in the office
environment where you’ve got access to a client’s account for a short period of time
or something like that and you want to give team members access.
If multiple people have Dashlane, you can share account information and share access
in a secure environment, which is a pretty cool way of using it.
It’s also really useful say if you’re travelling abroad and you want to give a family
member access bank account while you’re gone, you can do it through Dashlane so you’re
not sending it out the account information in the public, kind of over in email or over
multiple emails or something like that.
Those are the basic differences between the versions.
When you install it, the process is quite simple.
On the Mac version what I did is I downloaded an app and this the app here which I installed.
As I went to install the app, the first thing they asked me to set up is a master password.
So you have to create one really good password that you have to remember and that master
password then controls all of the other passwords.
It keeps them encrypted and kind of behind a firewall.
So you have to keep track of your master password.
It has to be at least eight digits long, it has to have capital letters as well as numbers.
So make that a really robust, good and as cryptic of password as is possible.
Once you set that up, then they will go through your computer and they’ll look on your browser
for any passwords and accounts that happen to be embedded already in your browser because
you know as you’re going through your day-to-day activities, sometimes your browser is saving
password and account information.
So it strips all of that out of your browsers and allows you to set those up as kind of
your starter set of accounts.
That’s what I did.
For the most part for me, they’re really old accounts that I really never use anymore
because I moved everything over into LastPass but it does give us a base to work from for
this demonstration.
Then they ask for permission to install the browser extension.
For the most part, you’re going to be using Dashlane in your browser.
So I’ve got it here running on Chrome right here and you can see the browser extension,
right here in the corner.
Actually, LastPass works the exact same way.
Most password managers are going to install as an extension.
This recognized that I have Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
It installed in all of them and it will sync across all of those at the same time.
The syncing that’s in the premium version is syncing across devices, not syncing within
the same computer, if that makes sense to you.
So once that’s done, it’s pretty straightforward.
Here are the accounts that it’s found for me and it’s kind of set up.
It goes through and allows us to manage our accounts in this kind of environment, in this
browser environment.
But the thing that I find really useful is the fact that we can go into the security
dashboard as soon as we’ve set it up and it tells us what your security score is.
Now mine is very low but these as I say, these are old accounts that I’m not really using
anymore.
It’s looking through and it’s found that out of 25 accounts that I’d imported, 18
of them have weak passwords and 14 of them have duplicated passwords.
That’s what we want to go through and clean up.
It’ll actually allow us to begin that process right here from this panel of clicking on
and replacing passwords, going through and updating all of the passwords.
You don’t have to make up a bunch of passwords.
It will automatically create cryptic passwords for each.
You just have to remember that master password.
Now when you go and visit any secure site and you want to sign in into any of your accounts,
there are a couple of ways that you can go about it with Dashlane.
You can click here in the browser window, on the tool in the toolbar and it’ll pop
up all of the different websites that you have passwords for.
You can navigate to them just by clicking on the icon there and it brings you in and
it logs you into the account very easily.
It’s very slick.
I really like this.
This is really nice and intuitive.
It’s almost like a bookmarking service that they’ve got here.
Conversely in LastPass, which is the password manager which I’ve used up to now, you have
to go in and you have to start typing in each of the sites basically in this.
You can see that their menu is a little more utilitarian.
It might be a little more powerful in some ways but a little less user friendly so you
get the idea of the difference between the two apps just from that one thing that we
looked at there.
But that’s basically the process that you go through.
If you are signing in on any account—let me just go to an account that I might have
to sign in.
Let me sign out of my Google account and I’ll show you what happens.
I’ll just go to WordPress.
I’ll go to a WordPress site.
There we go.
I’ll go to sign in to WordPress.
As I go there, what will happen is, you see what’s happened here is Dashlane has brought
up all of the different WordPress accounts that I have ad is giving me access to be able
to log in as soon as it recognizes which one I’m at.
It will allow me to log in.
We’ve got this functionality right here.
You also typically, if you take a look inside of the dialog box itself, you’ll be able
to click on there.
If you just have a single one, you’ll be able to click on it and it will bring up the
passwords for that particular site itself.
In this case here, it’s actually showing me the LastPass ones because LastPass is installed
and just confusing things a little bit.
But basically, you can just click on any dialog box as you go to enter.
Some of the other features that it’ll do is it also looks for auto-fill.
So you also put in all of your different basic information, your name, your birthday and
your address and it will look to auto-fill and it’ll auto-populate that information
for you with your permission with the site you visit which is a big benefit.
It will also do the same kind of things with your payment system if you want to store credit
cards for making online payments a little bit easier.
If you trust the system for that, it will work very well in that area.
The final thing I wanted to show you before I leave it is the sharing center which if
you have somebody else you want to share a password with that has Dashlane and is in
your community, you can share an item with them, you can share an email with them which
will send them an email that looks just like this.
Let me go to my updates here.
There it is right there.
They send an email that includes the password.
The password is not in the open but basically you’ve got an HTML or a web link which you
can click which will then launch the app to give them access to an app, which is great
if you are a services company and you need to give somebody access to your Facebook page
for a short period of time or something like that.
You can get them to sign in if you want through this sort of secure environment where you
control the access for a period of time.
That’s one of the nice features of Dashlane.
They’ve kind of thought through that team environment quite well.
The bottom line is I don’t care whether you use LastPass, whether you use a tool like
OnePassword, whether you use KeyPass, whether you use Dashlane, find one that resonates
for you that you think you can figure out and you can use and start to use it.
It’s only step one in the security process.
You should also do two-factor authentication which we have video on which you should be
watching and taking advantage of.
That’s a really good way to really up your level of personal security but this is the
first step—good username and good password management.
I think Dashlane, I’m giving it a big thumbs up.
I really like the interface.
I’m not sure I’m going to switch over from LastPass because I’m used to using
LastPass and I’ve had it for so long but if I was starting out, I would not hesitate
making my first step being the first step onto Dashlane.
I think it’s an awesome introduction.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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I look forward to seeing you again in the near future.
I’m Steve Dotto, till next time.
Have fun storming the castle.