Password Security and Privacy

These are highlights, notes, and links from my presentation given at the main branch of the Framingham Public Library on Friday, July 7, 2017. I also did a brief blog post on Password Managers.

Some of the presentation might seem intimidating or scary. Don’t let this concern you. I assure you, you can do everything we will talk about.

Smartphones

Computers and the Web

  • Encrypt your computer (This is harder to do than for your phone. I recommend getting help. I can help you if you are interested. Contact me.)
  • Standard recommendations:
    • Use unique passwords on every site
    • Use at least 20 to 25 characters in each password
    • Use a completely random sequence of characters
  • How can we possibly do the above and still remember all our passwords? You can’t! Use a password manager.
    • You only need to remember one password (your “master password”) which should be actually be a long pass phrase
    • Use the password manager to generate unique individual passwords for each account
    • Your password manager remembers all your passwords for you
    • There are links to the most popular password managers and reviews of them in this blog post
  • Here I demonstrated the password manager I use (KeePass)

Use Two Factor Authentication (2FA) Whenever You Can