Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. This is Part 3 of my course, The Practical Guide to Mac Security.
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Now that you know that having strong passwords is vitality important to the security of your Mac and
all your online accounts let's learn how to create some on your Mac. To create a random password
you need to be using a computer program called a Password Manager to generate a strong randomly
generated unique password for every site and service you sign up to. There is such a Password
Manager built into macOS. So we're going to use that. However, you could also use a third party
password manager such as OnePassword or LastPass to do this. The built-in Password Manager is found
in Safari. So you go to use the Safari web browser on your Mac. Let's say you want to sign up for an
account at a site. So I'm going to use archive.org as an example here. Let's sign up by clicking that
link there and you could see that to sign up for an account her I need to enter my email address,
Choose a name, and then a password. So let's enter an email address,
choose a name, and now a password.
Immediately you can see that Safari takes over here and creates a strong password. You could
see it filled in here. You actually only see part of what's there. You don't need to see the entire
thing. So you can see that this is a strong password, randomly generated using letters,
numbers, uppercase, lowercase, everything. It's going to give you this message over here. Safari
created a strong password for this website. It will automatically be saved to your iCloud
Keychain. So we are going to say Yes, use the strong password.
Now you could see it filled in there. It's as easy as that.
Now let's say at a later time we returned to this site and want to login. We don't have to remember
that long password. We don't have to type it in at all. As a matter of fact we don't even need
to remember our ID. Safari is going to prompt us to enter this in. When I go to click here to enter
in my email address and password Safari is going to prompt me right away recognizing that there
already is an email address and password stored that I can just access by clicking here. If there
is more than one if I had, say, two accounts at this site then I would see a list of two of them.
If there were several more I could always go to other passwords and it would bring up a longer
list. I'm going to select this one here and it's going to recall user ID and my password
and place them in there. I didn't have to type them. I didn't have to even see the password.
Also note there's a little key here to the right. If I click on that it will also bring
this up. So if I perhaps clicked on the wrong one or maybe I hit a key and dismissed it,
I could bring this back up and use it again. Then I could use the login button
to log back into the site. So every time I visit this site I don't have
to enter my password in. It can automatically be pulled from Safari's database of passwords.
Now there is a way to see a list of your passwords. If you go to Safari, Preferences
then you could go to Passwords and here you have to confirm by entering in your Password or you
can use Touch ID if you have a Mac with Touch ID and here you could see a list of all the websites
where you have passwords. You could see your User Name and you could see the Password here but it's
blocked out. You can select it and it will show you the password if you really want to see it.
You can double click it to bring up details. There's also a Details button down here.
It will show you the website, User Name, and the Password. You can even go in here and select it,
copy it, you can change it. So if you changed your Password and for some reason Safari did an update,
you can type something new here as well. In this list you can Control click on any one of these.
You can copy the website, copy the User Name, or copy the Password and you could also simply hit
the Delete key and it will Delete this password. So if you want to get rid of one you can.
There's also an option here, you could see it says Detect Password's Compromised by Known Data Leaks.
This will look at your Passwords and see if any of them show up in a list of passwords that have been
compromised. Now it could have been compromised because it was your password on that account and
that is now something that is out there in lists for people to be able to obtain.
It could be that that password was used by you on a another site or perhaps somebody
completely different if it's a weak password. But, of course, if you see any indicators here showing
that there is a compromised password then you should go and change it for that site.
So how do you change a Password for a site? Well, let's continue with the login for
archive.org here. I will look at my settings for my account and you could see here it allows me
to change my password. So if I go to enter in a password here, you could see it's going to
ask me if I want to fill-in my password, but I don't want to do that. I want to change it.
But if I click here you could see I get something that looks very similar, but one of the things
it's going to have is Suggest a New Password. So this will work slightly different on different
sites. But basically you go through whatever the website's regular functionality is for changing
your password. When you enter in a new password, like that, then you hit Change Account Settings
it should update the account with that new password in Safari. So let's check here
and you could see it puts a new password in place. That's because when we went here and suggested a
new password it was Safari itself suggesting a new password. So it knows that that new password
is now set and when you go in and look again you can see that it's remembering that new password
for the next time you want to login.
So updating your password should automatically update Safari's list of passwords.
The great thing about doing this as part of iCloud Keychain is that these passwords will also be used
on your iPad, your iPhone, other Macs. Anything connected to your iCloud Account
will have access to these passwords as long as you're logged into that iCloud Account and also,
of course, logged into that device. So you create a new password here
on your Mac and you'll be able to log into the same site on say your iPhone.
Now starting with macOS Monterey there is also the ability to access your password outside of Safari
in System Preferences. So you go to System Preferences and then you'll see Passwords there.
It looks a lot like how it does in Safari and you'll see these same passwords there
and be able to access them and edit them. So you can do this without ever going into Safari. This
is especially useful if the website also has an app and you're trying to login using the same
User ID and Password in the app that you are on the web. Of course you're not in Safari when
you're doing that so accessing passwords from System Preferences might be more convenient.
Now one last word about Password Managers. A third party Password Manager is especially useful if you
are using a Mac and maybe some non Apple products. Maybe you have an android phone. Maybe you have
a windows computer. You want to go beyond the devices that use iCloud. In that case a third
party Password Manager that's cross platform could be handy because then you have access to your
passwords everywhere. One such one that I use is OnePassword. You can get that at OnePassword.com
but the apps are also available in the App Stores. Also another one that a lot of people use is
LastPass. So the idea here is that you can take your passwords to websites and access them using
browser extensions in any browser. So in your Mac and say Chrome or Firefox and also in Windows,
in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and having a third party Password Manager allows you to use these passwords
in all sorts of situations where completely Apple centric solutions like Safari and iCloud will not.