3 reasons password managers are better than sticky notes

Maybe you’ve heard of password managers before, maybe you haven’t, but either way if you’re not using one yet – read on to change your life. (Or at the very least, make your passwords more secure).

Generally, good password advice is to use a different password for every account login that you have (both personally and professionally) and make sure it’s difficult to guess, either using a string of random words with a mix of numbers and symbols, or a long string of letters, numbers, and symbols which look like utter nonsense, but which are near impossible to guess.

But if we’re meant to keep all of these passwords stored, how are we meant to store them? When you’ve got a difficult password to remember that you need to enter all the time, there’s a very real temptation to pull out your pen and write it on a sticky note which you attach to your monitor.

What this fails to take into account though, is that sticky notes are like Tupperware lids and one sock from every pair – they have a habit of disappearing without a trace, and no-one knows where they’ve gone. Maybe the bin, maybe the bottom of the shoe of an unwitting colleague? It’s a mystery! But what that does mean, is that it’s likely your password will end up floating around in the world completely out of your control.

Writing them down in a notebook isn’t much better, either. No only could you lose the notebook and get locked out of all of your accounts as a result, if someone dishonest finds it, then they’ll think they’ve hit a gold mine. How many of your accounts do you have card or other financial details attached to?

And even simpler than that, by writing your passwords down manually, you’re opening yourself up for a whole catalogue of errors. Are you going to remember in 2 weeks’ time if that was a 5, or maybe an S? Or if that was a capital I or a lowercase l.

Never fear though, password managers are here to save us all from ourselves and help beef up our cyber security.

Here are the 3 reasons we think they’re better than sticky notes:

#1 You get one password for everything

A password manager is basically a vault, or multiple vaults filled with passwords which are behind a door, and only you have the key to that door. This means that out of your hundreds of passwords, you only ever really need to remember one of them – great stuff!

#2 It will autofill your passwords

You can make your merry way around the internet logging into things until your heart’s content, and your password manager will autofill your passwords, doing all of the hard work for you. You’ll never need to click that little button of humiliation ‘forgot password’ again!

#3 You can protect yourself even further with multi-factor authentication

To ensure your passwords are as safe as humanly possible, you can add MFA to your account and verify any logins with your device. This just adds another layer of protection between cyber criminals and your passwords with very little disruption to your day.

If you’d like us to take a look at your current password security setup, or would like some information about Myki, the password manager we use for our clients – please get in touch. Just a call in with us below: