LastPass Password Security

LastPass is a password manager that works on all your devices.
It is free to use on computers, and has a premium upgrade for mobility devices.
With LastPass you can have very secure passwords for all your services and sites, without having to remember or write them down.
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About Steve
Steve Dotto is a long time host and executive producer of Dotto Tech, Canada's longest-running technology TV show.
After 15 years on national television, Steve now delivers his advice and how-to videos on YouTube.
Every week we produce one new video which shows how technology fits in your life.
We cover all aspects of technology for my personal use perspective. Concentrating on productivity solutions.
Windows, Mac, iOS, android, iphone, apps, gmail, google drive, ipad tables all get covered. 
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www.dottotech.com

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Closed Caption:

Steve Dotto here. I’m glad you’re spending
time with me today and today’s demo is so
important. We’re going to be taking a look
at password management. Now I know you probably
think,. “How boring, Steve. Password management
is hardly the sexiest thing on the planet.”
And it’s not the sexiest thing on the planet
but it’s really important. Why is it really
important? Because you probably have terrible
password management techniques. I’m assuming
that but I think I might be right.
Do you use the same password over and over
again and maybe just add an extension on the
end? Do you change your passwords on a regular
basis? Do you use super-encrypted passwords?
Well, if you do, congratulations. Good on
you and it’s probably because you’re using
a password manager. For those of you who aren’t,
it’s because you’re not using a password
manager.
Let me show you what a password manager will
do for you. We’re going to take a look today
at LastPass, which is the tool that I’ve
been using for a little bit over a year and
I think has done a really good job of integrating
in my life and making me more secure. I would
be remiss if I didn’t talk about kind of
the heavy weight in this space which is 1Password.
These guys have done a tremendous job of building
an app and if you’re using this particular
app then you’re in good shape. The thing
about 1Password is it gets a little bit expensive
to use. I find it a little bit pricey but
it does a great job of protecting you and
can you really put a price on your security
and privacy? Probably not so 1Password is
a great tool.
But for me, I like LastPass. Why? Because
it’s free to start with and it does pretty
much everything I need. Now the keys to a
good password manager are a couple of things.
One, it has to be secure. Two, it has to be
pretty easy to use because the last thing
we need is another thing to do in between
getting into our account that we need to get
into. We don’t need to be bothered as we
go in so it has to be very secure as far as
that’s concerned. And it also has to be
cross-platform. It has to work on all of our
different devices.
Now when you install LastPass, it will install
in your web browser to start. It’s going
to look through your system and it’s going
to find all your different usernames and passwords
that you’ve used that you’ve stored kind
of out in the open, say in your browser cache.
It’s going to find all those and it’s
going to create a starting file for you to
work with. We can see that I’m working on
Chrome on a Mac here. It installs here in
your toolbar and it’s got something called
the LastPass Vault. The LastPass Vault is
where we store all of our different passwords
and accounts that we use on a regular basis.
All of them are in here. We’ve got all of
the different places that we’ve logged in
that have a password and username. So it’s
going to store all of those things for us.
That is a great start.
But here’s the thing. Most of those accounts,
for a lot of us, have the same password so
overtime you’re going to have to commit
to a strategy as you visit each new secure
site, taking of taking a little bit of time,
going in and changing the password to a more
secure password. LastPass will help you with
that but you have to go through this process
as you go along. It’s well worth the time
however because how often have you gone to
website that you haven’t visited for a long
time that you have an account for and you
can’t remember your username, you can’t
remember your password so you have to do that
whole recall thing where they email you back
your new password. What a colossal waste of
time! Probably five or six minutes per site.
Once you’ve done once with LastPass, you’ll
never have to do that again because LastPass
will always have your current password stored
and available for you.
I know you’re already thinking, “Wait
a minute, it’s got all of the passwords
for these sites. Well, what about getting
into LastPass? If somebody gets into my LastPass
account, they would have access to all my
accounts, wouldn’t they? That would be disastrous.”
Indeed, it would be. That’s why you have
to have a super good encrypted password for
your LastPass account. Now it separates your
account ID and your log-in information to
on your computer and online so it’s a very
secure environment as far as how it protects
your privacy. But here’s a tip for an additional
level of security. You’re going to need
a great password for LastPass and it’s one
that you should change on a fairly regular
basis as well. This is where so many of us
run into challenges. A lot of people create
a great password and then they store it in
a text file or they store it in their address
book. These are terrible things to do.
Here’s my tip. Pick a phrase. It could be
a nonsensical phrase but not just a word but
a whole phrase that makes sense to you and
use that, maybe a quote from one of your favorite
movies. Then use the technique that I’m
showing you here on the screen, which includes
substituting symbols and numbers for some
letters that make logical sense for you and
help you remember. So that top one says “P@55worD
1De@$ (Password ideas).” Can you read the
sign underneath? Can you read what my pass
phrase would be underneath? It’s h@v3fun5storm1ngthec@5tle
(Have fun storming the castle) which is a
great line from the Princess Bride but that’s
going to be a very difficult thing for anybody
to hack because of all of the different symbols
that I used. If you remember where you’re
using symbols and they make sense visually
to you, this is a password that you could
remember that’s still incredible secure.
So come up with your own. Don’t use those
two by all means. That’s the philosophy
of passwords. That’s installing LastPass
in the Password Vault.
How does it look when we actually use it?
Well, let’s just go into a site that I go
to once a week. I go and I upload my new podcast.
So when I go and log into my site, I click
on Log In. This is a secure site that I want
to keep secure. It remembers by username and
remembers my account information. We see here
the LastPass symbols in the side of the entry
fields that tells me LastPass is the one that’s
giving me the information. I just click Log
In and I’m brought into that particular
site. That’s how convenient LastPass is
for us to use. As I say, it saves me a tremendous
amount of time.
Now you don’t even have to navigate through
the web browser. You can actually navigate
to these sites through the LastPass Vault.
You can use that kind of as bookmarking system
for all of your different secure sites.
Now I mentioned an ongoing strategy. When
you install LastPass, commit to as you visit
every new secure site to taking a few minutes
the first time you visit is and changing the
password. Let me show you how that works within
LastPass. This is an old fly fishing forum
that I am a member of. Now why is it important
to change all these? Because often we use
the same password on those old sites that
we use on some new stuff so our password is
out there and it’s stored on a lot f secure
places. But just how secure are those places?
We just recently heard that Adobe got hacked
and everybody who had an online account with
Adobe, their passwords were compromised, which
somebody has my password attached to an account
name that they might be able to figure out
and they may be able to track it down to me.
So the password that I had on Adobe is now
completely compromised. If I’m using that
anywhere else, I could be screwed. So it’s
important for us—we never know what sites
are going to be hacked—to go through and
to have unique passwords and usernames on
each of those sites. Now the username won’t
always be unique because often it’s our
email address so we have to make sure that
that password is unique.
Here I am on an old fly fishing site. You
see here in the New Password field, it’s
got the LastPass icon. If I right-click on
that, I can choose to have LastPass generate
a secure password for me. It creates one of
these great cryptic passwords and you can
make them as long as you want. You make them
more than just 12 characters. 12 characters
is pretty secure though.
When I click Accept, it autopopulates them
into the field. Then I click on Change my
Password and now LastPass is storing that
information and saving it for me so that when
I return to this site, you see here I’m
confirming that I want to save this, and now
LastPass has saved that password attached
to this fly fishing forum. So I’ve got a
good, secure password that even if this site
got hacked, they would never be able to use
that password to help them get into one of
my other accounts. My level of security just
improved that much by that one action. Take
the time to do this each step of the way.
Now give me a second here and let me fire
up my smartphone because I want to show you
LastPass on the phone, in the mobility space.
There is my smartphone, in this case it’s
an iPhone, and you see I have two apps. I
have LastPass Wallet or LP Wallet, which allows
me to store my credit card information, my
driver’s license number, those sorts of
things in a secure environment within my phone
in case I happened to need that information
and I don’t have the cards available.
And I’ve also got LastPass. Now the LastPass
app here is in fact its own little tabbed
web browser that allows me to navigate the
web through LastPass. Here’s where it works
beautifully. If you need to get into your
bank account or one of your secure sites,
you just open the LastPass browser, tap on
the little LastPass symbol and there and there
you’ve got the same list as you have in
the LastPass Vault.
Say I wanted to sign into my email autoresponder
account, I can just click then and launch
it. It then opens the account, populates my
log-in information and then brings me into
that account. Isn’t that convenient for
accessing all of our most secure information?
And this is what’s available. This is what
you pay a dollar a month for, to get access
to all of those accounts on all of your devices
which gives you tremendous flexibility and
tremendous functionality.
If you stop and think about it, by creating
a good password strategy, you’re probably
not going to waste a lot of time and lose
a lot of time and energy. Instead, by having
it all contained like this in a place that
you trust and a trusted system, you’re probably
going to end up saving a lot of time as well
as making yourself more secure because every
time you go to enter one of those secure sites,
you’re not fumbling around trying to remember
the username, looking it up where you happened
to store it, maybe in a less than secure place.
Instead you’re going to be using one tool
that you trust and is very secure in order
to access all of your different secure sites.
That, to me, is the beginning of a really
good, trusted security system and LastPass
sits at the heart of it, as far as I’m concerned.
I hope you found this video to be useful.
If you have, please give us a like. We always
like to have Likes here on YouTube. I’m
Steve Dotto. Thanks for spending time with
me today.
[END OF VIDEO LastPass Password Security 10:22]