Why you should use a password manager

Most people on the internet either repeat a single password on most of their online accounts, repeat a few, or use a few variations of a single password.

The problem with this is that you can almost count on every site on the internet eventually getting hacked, their passwords leaked, and this then presents a problem, as if most of your password are the same, and some old site you no longer even remember is hacked, this means that all your other sites' accounts become immediately compromised.

There's even a site that tracks these leaks. You can check yourself there: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

If you are in this situation, don't be hard on yourself, remembering meaningless words associated with each site or service you register on is nearly impossible, and well, who has the mental energy to even try to do it?

There's a solution for this however, and its called using a password manager.

How password managers work

These types of programs or services help you in two different ways:

They assist you saving and updating passwords for all your accounts, so you end up with a library of all your accounts and their passwords.

They assist you in generating very complex passwords for each account, logging in using these passwords in a simple manner, and some of them even log you in automatically. 

Different kinds of password managers

You can categorize them in very different ways, I've taken the liberty of doing so by who has control of the password library: Local and online solutions.

Local password managers

These are programs that you install on your computer, for example KeyPass. 

The advantage of using local password managers is that you do not rely on a third party's security. So by using this type of password managers, your passwords never actually reach the internet, and that is a really good thing.

The disadvantage is that if you ever have to reinstall your machine, you better make sure to back up your passwords. Also, if you use several different machines to access the internet, you'll have to sync these passwords somehow, either manually or via a different third party service like Dropbox, which I don't recommend.

Online password managers

These are online services, that take care of storing and giving you access to your passwords, for example LastPass.

The advantage of using such service is that you have access to your password on any machine you use, and you don't need to worry about backing them up before reinstalling. Some of them even help you by allowing you to very quickly change your password to something new.

The disadvantage is that if the service is poorly implemented, and it gets compromised then all your passwords are at risk. This is usually mitigated by the fact that your passwords are encrypted when you first save them to the service, so if an attacker gets a hold of them, they only get an encrypted version of your passwords, which is useless for most folks.

Conclusion

Personally, I use LastPass. Every once in a while I consider switching to KeyPass, and perhaps one day I will, but for now the trade-off of convenience is enough for my case.

I wanted to make this article accessible to most people, so I haven't gone into much depth, let me know if I succeeded in interesting you on this, and if you have any questions let me know in the comments.