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It’s a good tool for staying on top of accounts you don’t use often and might have forgotten about. The useful password check-up feature can scan through your saved passwords for reused or weak passwords, as well as any that it knows have been leaked somewhere online. Then, when you next sign in, the username and password boxes will be pre-filled with your saved details. Whenever you sign in or register an account with a new password, a pop-up notification will appear, asking you if you’d like to save your username and password to your Google account. While not as feature-rich as a dedicated password manager, Google’s password manager is completely free and nails the basics.
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Google has a decent free password manager built right into the Chrome browser. Cons: Pretty basic, not as seamless for iPhone users.Pros: Seamless integration with the browser, synchronises everywhere you use Google.Some of the very best ones are free as well, so you really should start using one. Put simply, password managers are safe, they work across most browsers and on your phone, and they’re not very complicated to set up and use. Password managers help here, too, by storing all your unique, impossible-to-guess passwords for every site you use, and then automatically filling in your login details for you as you browse the web. And in an age when we rely so heavily on the internet to do everything from grocery shopping to banking, losing access to your accounts can be devastating. Password managers are applications that generate strong passwords made up of long strings of randomised characters, making this kind of hacking attempt futile.Īn even worse habit is our tendency to recycle the same password across multiple sites, so when one account is compromised by a hacker, the rest of your accounts fall like dominoes. These types of password are relatively straightforward for a hacker to guess, whether by snooping around your social media pages or by using brute force – that is, cycling through every possible word combination in the dictionary until the correct password is eventually found.
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