It’s no secret that being connected to the Internet makes our computers and mobile devices vulnerable to hackers.
Passwords have long been used to protect our online accounts from those threats, but those once-trusted passwords are becoming less effective by the day as hacking methods become increasingly sophisticated.
In short, a simple password that’s just a few characters long offers very little real protection against the sophisticated hacking methods that are being used today.
As a result, most security experts now recommend using longer passwords consisting of dozens of random characters. But there’s a problem with that as well: Passwords like that are almost impossible to remember.
To make the task of “remembering” long, cryptic passwords easier, several companies have developed apps that can remember all of your long passwords for you. In fact, they can even enter them for you with a simple click of the mouse or tap of the screen. All you have to do is remember one master password and all will be golden in your online world.
But there’s a problem still: Password manager apps can be insecure themselves.
Recently discovered security flaws in several of the most popular password manager apps have prompted me to once again warn you of the dangers of relying on those types of apps to safeguard your online accounts from the hackers and scammers of the world.
This article details the security flaws found in the various password manager apps so you can read about them it for yourself if you wish.
I should point out that all the security flaws discovered and exposed in this article have now been patched. But that being said, there’s no way to guarantee there aren’t other flaws that simply haven’t been detected yet.
The bottom line is this: No app will ever be completely fool-proof when it comes to protecting your passwords (and by extension your privacy, identity and finances) from hackers.
In my humble opinion, the best way to protect your online accounts is to ditch your password manager app and choose a different password that’s secure, yet easy to remember for every one of your accounts and enable two factor authentication on every account that offers it as an option.
In summary, password manger apps are a wonderful idea in theory, but I simply refuse to trust a single app to keep all of my passwords secure. After all, one simple exploit could potentially hand over the password to every online account you have to a hacker or scammer.
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