Passwords are still at the heart of the current authentication methods.
Although password-less technologies are emerging, such as fingerprint, face detection, and voice activation, their implementation is still limited. Web and native applications still use a password as a primary means of authentication. Mobile devices make up a large percentage of our online activities. From entertainment to news, sports, payment services, file storage, instant messaging, social media, and other wide-range of services available on mobile. All of these services hold our data and personal information; hence, the use of authentication.
How do you use passwords?
According to a survey by LastPass, approximately 35% of people tend to re-use passwords because they don’t want to forget. And 45% re-use because they believe their accounts are not valuable to any hacker.
From a Google survey of 3000 U.S. adults published in 2019, 52% of people still re-use passwords for multiple accounts, 13% re-use the same password for all accounts, and 35% use a different password for all accounts. This shows that there is a large pool of individuals who are at risk of suffering security breaches from multiple accounts when one of their accounts gets compromised.
Yet, from the survey, there were 69% of people give themselves an ‘A’ or ‘B’ (denoting distinction level) in their ability to protect their online accounts. This shows a disparity between knowledge and action.
Security experts generally recommend the use of secure passwords. So as to make it difficult for a malicious hacker to quickly calculate the possible password combination or guess the password by using a simple dictionary attack. Likewise, there should be a different password for each of your online accounts. To prevent an attacker from getting access to all your accounts by breaking into one.
Most people have a hard time keeping a list of the different ‘strong‘ passwords they have generated for different online accounts over time. Hence, the need to use an effective password manager.
Keeper
Keeper is a highly secure application for managing passwords on your mobile devices. It is available both on Android and iOS. With over 84,000 reviews, it has an impressive 4.6-star rating on Google play store and over 10million downloads. Some of its features include the following.
- Record creation and auto-fill
Keeper allows you to create password records and auto-fills records. This information will later be used to auto-fill login forms on the web. Likewise, other useful auto-fill information, such as addresses and contact. It also includes an option to create your payment card records such as debit or credit cards for quickly filling online forms.
- Import of existing records
Keeper allows you to import all existing saved passwords on your computer. This allows you to have a central location for all your password storage.
- BreachWatch
It now includes a new feature known as BreachWatch, which monitors the internet for stolen login credentials that match yours and send you an alert so that you can better protect yourself.
- Data sharing
Keeper also has in-built folder sharing, where you can securely share data from your device with another user.
1Password
1Password is a well-known password manager. This is available on iOS 12 or Android 5.0 or newer devices. It is easy to use and comes with family plans, which makes it cheaper.
The app comes with an AES 256-bit secured vault, where your files can be securely stored. It also has an integration with Dropbox for authentication. There is also a feature known as 1Password watch-tower, which alerts you regularly on the current state of vulnerabilities regarding vulnerable websites and passwords.
1Password also enables you to generate strong and unique passwords for every website you visit and has the ability to securely stored credit card information when you make online transactions.
Tenorshare 4uKey
Tenorshare 4uKey is a password manager for iOS devices.
It is available for iPhone SE(2nd) and iOS/iPad 13.5 or newer. This password manager is more famous for its recovery abilities. Tenorshare 4uKey can unlock iPhones whose password you have forgotten. This is especially useful in cases where you need to transfer ownership of an old iPhone device. The recovery also clears all the data on the device and starts the phone afresh.
It also has an integration with 1Password, which gives the ability to transfer all the saved passwords on Tenorshare to it.
LastPass
LastPass is a top-tier password manager. It is available on Android and iOS devices. It can store passwords, credit card information on all the websites you visit. The ‘Families’ plan has organized the storage of all family members’ accounts to keep track of each person’s passwords on all the websites they visit. It can also help with autofill login credentials when you visit websites with saved credentials.
With over 5 million downloads on Playstore, it is quite highly used.
It is also available for iPad and Apple watch.
Google Password Manager
This is a password manager provided by Google.
It works seamlessly on all devices running Google chrome. It serves as a cloud backup for all your chrome browser passwords. You can retrieve the passwords on any browser when you visit passwords.google.com and log in with your Google account. It also helps with the autofill of login credentials.
Likewise, it helps with generating secure passwords while registering online accounts.
Samsung Pass
Samsung Pass is an ‘identity management-as-a-service’ platform for Samsung devices. This is a distinct credential management platform that is basically passwordless and uses biometrics such as fingerprint, iris, and face recognition to authenticate a user.
The user’s biometrics are encrypted to avoid man-in-the-middle identity theft. This ensures that you do not need to remember any password to login to your favorite apps.
Dashlane
Dashlane is an easy-to-use password manager. It is available for Android and iOS devices. It has the ability to store passwords for all the apps that you use and those on the web. Like most password managers, you only have to remember the password to the app itself.
It can also store other personal information, payments, and IDs. You also have access to an ‘Identity Dashboard’ which shows you the status of your passwords. Likewise, it has Dark web monitoring to alert you when your credentials have been leaked online.
Enpass
Enpass is a digital information manager. It is primarily used to store passwords but also can be used for credit cards, bank accounts, licenses, and IDs. It works on Android and iOS devices, both.
Enpass keeps password storage locally on the device, and also has an integration with third-party cloud providers, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, One drive, etc. to sync your credentials with the cloud. Hence, Enpass does not store users’ credentials on its own servers.
It also has the option of unlocking the app using your biometrics instead of the master password.
MSecure
MSecure emphasis on simplicity and convenience. It has a Security Center for reporting weak, duplicate, or old passwords.
Password Safe
This is recognized on PlayStore as Password Safe – Secure Password Manager and on iOS as Password Safe and Manager. The password manager is totally offline and stores all password on the users’ device, however, it has an export functionality which can be used to sync your credentials to a third-party cloud service provider such as dropbox.
Conclusion
Many users believe that their account is not worthy enough to be hacked or their credentials to be stolen. Therefore they leave their accounts vulnerable by using weak and repetitive passwords for all their online accounts. This is a false mindset and should be changed. Attackers with malicious intent steal people’s identities to commit fraudulent activities online. Hence, the need to protect yourself and make your own security a top priority.
Ensure to generate secure and unique passwords for your various online accounts and use a password manager to keep all of your passwords safe and easily available.
