Lastpass Password Security

Steve Dotto here. I’m glad you’re spending time with me today and today’s demo is so important. We’re going to be taking a look at password management. Now I know you probably think,. “How boring, Steve. Password management is hardly the sexiest thing on the planet.” And it’s not the sexiest thing on the planet but it’s really important. Why is it really important? Because you probably have terrible password management techniques. I’m assuming that but I think I might be right. Do you use the same password over and over again and maybe just add an extension on the end? Do you change your passwords on a regular basis? Do you use super-encrypted passwords? Well, if you do, congratulations. Good on you and it’s probably because you’re using a password manager. For those of you who aren’t, it’s because you’re not using a password manager. Let me show you what a password manager will do for you. We’re going to take a look today at LastPass, which is the tool that I’ve been using for a little bit over a year and I think has done a really good job of integrating in my life and making me more secure. I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about kind of the heavy weight in this space which is 1Password. These guys have done a tremendous job of building an app and if you’re using this particular app then you’re in good shape. The thing about 1Password is it gets a little bit expensive to use. I find it a little bit pricey but it does a great job of protecting you and can you really put a price on your security and privacy? Probably not so 1Password is a great tool. But for me, I like LastPass. Why? Because it’s free to start with and it does pretty much everything I need. Now the keys to a good password manager are a couple of things. One, it has to be secure. Two, it has to be pretty easy to use because the last thing we need is another thing to do in between getting into our account that we need to get into. We don’t need to be bothered as we go in so it has to be very secure as far as that’s concerned. And it also has to be cross-platform. It has to work on all of our different devices. Now when you install LastPass, it will install in your web browser to start. It’s going to look through your system and it’s going to find all your different usernames and passwords that you’ve used that you’ve stored kind of out in the open, say in your browser cache. It’s going to find all those and it’s going to create a starting file for you to work with. We can see that I’m working on Chrome on a Mac here. It installs here in your toolbar and it’s got something called the LastPass Vault. The LastPass Vault is where we store all of our different passwords and accounts that we use on a regular basis. All of them are in here. We’ve got all of the different places that we’ve logged in that have a password and username. So it’s going to store all of those things for us. That is a great start. But here’s the thing. Most of those accounts, for a lot of us, have the same password so overtime you’re going to have to commit to a strategy as you visit each new secure site, taking of taking a little bit of time, going in and changing the password to a more secure password. LastPass will help you with that but you have to go through this process as you go along. It’s well worth the time however because how often have you gone to website that you haven’t visited for a long time that you have an account for and you can’t remember your username, you can’t remember your password so you have to do that whole recall thing where they email you back your new password. What a colossal waste of time! Probably five or six minutes per site. Once you’ve done once with LastPass, you’ll never have to do that again because LastPass will always have your current password stored and available for you. I know you’re already thinking, “Wait a minute, it’s got all of the passwords for these sites. Well, what about getting into LastPass? If somebody gets into my LastPass account, they would have access to all my accounts, wouldn’t they? That would be disastrous.” Indeed, it would be. That’s why you have to have a super good encrypted password for your LastPass account. Now it separates your account ID and your log-in information to on your computer and online so it’s a very secure environment as far as how it protects your privacy. But here’s a tip for an additional level of security. You’re going to need a great password for LastPass and it’s one that you should change on a fairly regular basis as well. This is where so many of us run into challenges. A lot of people create a great password and then they store it in a text file or they store it in their address book. These are terrible things to do. Here’s my tip. Pick a phrase. It could be a nonsensical phrase but not just a word but a whole phrase that makes sense to you and use that, maybe a quote from one of your favorite movies. Then use the technique that I’m showing you here on the screen, which includes substituting symbols and numbers for some letters that make logical sense for you and help you remember. So that top one says “P@55worD 1De@$ (Password ideas).” Can you read the sign underneath? Can you read what my pass phrase would be underneath? It’s h@v3fun5storm1ngthec@5tle (Have fun storming the castle) which is a great line from the Princess Bride but that’s going to be a very difficult thing for anybody to hack because of all of the different symbols that I used. If you remember where you’re using symbols and they make sense visually to you, this is a password that you could remember that’s still incredible secure. So come up with your own. Don’t use those two by all means. That’s the philosophy of passwords. That’s installing LastPass in the Password Vault. How does it look when we actually use it? Well, let’s just go into a site that I go to once a week. I go and I upload my new podcast. So when I go and log into my site, I click on Log In. This is a secure site that I want to keep secure. It remembers by username and remembers my account information. We see here the LastPass symbols in the side of the entry fields that tells me LastPass is the one that’s giving me the information. I just click Log In and I’m brought into that particular site. That’s how convenient LastPass is for us to use. As I say, it saves me a tremendous amount of time. Now you don’t even have to navigate through the web browser. You can actually navigate to these sites through the LastPass Vault. You can use that kind of as bookmarking system for all of your different secure sites. Now I mentioned an ongoing strategy. When you install LastPass, commit to as you visit every new secure site to taking a few minutes the first time you visit is and changing the password. Let me show you how that works within LastPass. This is an old fly fishing forum that I am a member of. Now why is it important to change all these? Because often we use the same password on those old sites that we use on some new stuff so our password is out there and it’s stored on a lot f secure places. But just how secure are those places? We just recently heard that Adobe got hacked and everybody who had an online account with Adobe, their passwords were compromised, which somebody has my password attached to an account name that they might be able to figure out and they may be able to track it down to me. So the password that I had on Adobe is now completely compromised. If I’m using that anywhere else, I could be screwed. So it’s important for us—we never know what sites are going to be hacked—to go through and to have unique passwords and usernames on each of those sites. Now the username won’t always be unique because often it’s our email address so we have to make sure that that password is unique. Here I am on an old fly fishing site. You see here in the New Password field, it’s got the LastPass icon. If I right-click on that, I can choose to have LastPass generate a secure password for me. It creates one of these great cryptic passwords and you can make them as long as you want. You make them more than just 12 characters. 12 characters is pretty secure though. When I click Accept, it autopopulates them into the field. Then I click on Change my Password and now LastPass is storing that information and saving it for me so that when I return to this site, you see here I’m confirming that I want to save this, and now LastPass has saved that password attached to this fly fishing forum. So I’ve got a good, secure password that even if this site got hacked, they would never be able to use that password to help them get into one of my other accounts. My level of security just improved that much by that one action. Take the time to do this each step of the way. Now give me a second here and let me fire up my smartphone because I want to show you LastPass on the phone, in the mobility space. There is my smartphone, in this case it’s an iPhone, and you see I have two apps. I have LastPass Wallet or LP Wallet, which allows me to store my credit card information, my driver’s license number, those sorts of things in a secure environment within my phone in case I happened to need that information and I don’t have the cards available. And I’ve also got LastPass. Now the LastPass app here is in fact its own little tabbed web browser that allows me to navigate the web through LastPass. Here’s where it works beautifully. If you need to get into your bank account or one of your secure sites, you just open the LastPass browser, tap on the little LastPass symbol and there and there you’ve got the same list as you have in the LastPass Vault. Say I wanted to sign into my email autoresponder account, I can just click then and launch it. It then opens the account, populates my log-in information and then brings me into that account. Isn’t that convenient for accessing all of our most secure information? And this is what’s available. This is what you pay a dollar a month for, to get access to all of those accounts on all of your devices which gives you tremendous flexibility and tremendous functionality. If you stop and think about it, by creating a good password strategy, you’re probably not going to waste a lot of time and lose a lot of time and energy. Instead, by having it all contained like this in a place that you trust and a trusted system, you’re probably going to end up saving a lot of time as well as making yourself more secure because every time you go to enter one of those secure sites, you’re not fumbling around trying to remember the username, looking it up where you happened to store it, maybe in a less than secure place. Instead you’re going to be using one tool that you trust and is very secure in order to access all of your different secure sites. That, to me, is the beginning of a really good, trusted security system and LastPass sits at the heart of it, as far as I’m concerned. I hope you found this video to be useful. If you have, please give us a like. We always like to have Likes here on YouTube. I’m Steve Dotto. Thanks for spending time with me today. [END OF VIDEO LastPass Password Security 10:22]