In this lesson,
we're going to cover the concept of a password manager.
Now, a password manager
is a specialized tool or plugin or extension
that can be used with your web browser
in order to remember all the different usernames
and passwords you have
for all the various sites that are out there.
Now, one of the biggest vulnerabilities or traps
that I see end users falling into
is the fact that they reuse their passwords.
And this is a really dangerous practice
because if you're reusing a password
across multiple websites
and one of those websites gets hacked,
well, your password is now known
by everybody on the dark web
and they can try using that across other sites as well.
We saw this happen many years ago
when sites like MSN or Yahoo or Target had gotten breached.
Then the attackers took those usernames
and passwords they got from that breach
and then tried it across many other sites.
And if you reuse the same username
or password across multiple sites,
they would have access to all of your data.
One of the biggest challenges with this password reuse
is that most usernames are going to be the same
because most usernames are going to be set
to your email address
and most of us use the same email address
across multiple sites.
So it is really important
that we use a different long, strong,
and complicated password
for every single website that we are going to use.
Now, unfortunately, as humans,
it's really hard for us to remember a lot of long, strong,
complicated passwords.
So there is this function called a password manager
who can do this for you.
And this is what we're going to talk about
in this particular lesson.
Now many of our web browsers
have a password functionality built into it directly.
For example, if you go into Google Chrome,
you'll find that when you go into the settings
underneath the three dots,
that you'll be able to go into your Autofill area.
And from here there is a built-in password manager.
Now you're going to notice here
that I actually am not using this password manager,
and most of the time,
I actually prefer to turn off the feature
to offer to save my passwords
or to use Auto Sign-in with this password manager.
The reason is, personally, I find that password managers
that are built into another tool
such as a web browser are not nearly as secure
as those that are standalone third-party tools.
So instead of using the built-in password manager
inside of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari,
or Mozilla Firefox,
I tend to prefer to use a third-party password manager
like OnePass, Dashlane, LastPass, or Bitwarden.
In my case, I actually prefer Bitwarden
and that's what I'm going to show you how to install
as a third-party extension into Google Chrome
and how you can use that type of a password manager
as you move forward with your daily work.
Now in order to install Bitwarden,
which is the password manager I want to use,
I need to first go into the extension store
and by going into the extension store or marketplace,
I can download the extensions that I want.
So I'm going to go up here into my three dots.
I'm going to go over here to my More tools
and then I'm going to go to Extensions.
From here, I'm going to be able to search my extensions,
which only search what's locally on my computer,
or I can click the three lines on the left hand side
and go down to the bottom to open the Chrome web store.
From here, I now have a trusted area
to download different tools, plugins,
and extensions that I may want to use.
In our case, I'm looking for a password manager,
so I'm going to type that in
and you're going to see
there are lots and lots of password managers out there,
but the first three that come up
are the ones that are featured by Google,
which include the Avira Password Manager, LastPass,
and Norton Password Manager.
In addition to this, if you click on the More button,
you'll see all of the other extensions
that fit the term password manager
sorted by either ranking
or being featured because they paid an extra fee to Google.
In my case, I only want to consider any password manager
that is going to be four star or above.
And so I can do that by clicking on the ratings over here.
And if I wanted to be even a little bit more stringent,
I could say I only want to look at five-star rated programs.
Here you can see that the first one
that pops up is Bitwarden,
which is the one that I personally use
and I really like it and trust it.
To be able to use Bitwarden here,
we'll simply click on it
and this will allow us to go
and add this into our Chrome as an extension.
Go ahead and click Add extension
and this now gives this password manager
the ability to read and write passwords
as you're entering them into different sites
and to be able to use those
and hold those as an encrypted and protected vault
that contains all of your sensitive information.
Once you have that done, you can go ahead and close this tab
and then we're going to go ahead and close this tab
and this tab as well,
bringing us back to our settings area.
From here, I'm going to click on the little puzzle piece icon,
which is for the extensions,
and you'll see the Bitwarden has now been installed.
If you click the little pin next to it,
this will pin it to your taskbar at the top
and you'll see it's now located right here.
From there, you can click on Bitwarden
and then you'll be able to log in,
sign in with an enterprise account or create a new account.
Bitwarden is a completely free password manager
that you can use on a personal level,
but if you're like me and you have a corporate account,
you can log in
using those corporate account credentials as well.
And there is a fee as a company
to be able to have a Bitwarden account
across your entire organization
and allows you to share passwords with other people as well.
And this makes it really useful,
especially if you want to share passwords
in a more secure way.
In our case, we're going to go ahead and create a new account,
and I'm just going to put in my email address.
In this case I'm going to use Titan Cipher,
which is an account I use for demonstrations
and I'm going to give it a nice, long, strong password.
Once you've done that,
you can then retype your master password
and this password is what's going to be used
to be able to create that encryption
and it's going to encrypt all of your documents
and all of your passwords using this same password.
This means if you ever forget this password,
you will now have no access
to any of the other passwords you have
because this is the encryption key.
So it's important to choose something
that is long and strong,
but also something you can remember.
The great thing about using a password manager
like this though
is you only have to remember one long, strong password
because everything else will be stored by this tool
and be able to be used anytime we log into a site.
Now that I've done that,
I'm going to click that I am human
by clicking the CAPTCHA
and then I will submit this
and this will create my new account.
Now that my new account has been created, I can log in,
so I'm going to use titancipher@gmail.com
and then my nice, long, strong password that I just created.
This will then decrypt this vault
and allow me to access anything inside of it.
Once you've done that, click I am a human, and then log in.
From here, you now have your vault,
and inside your vault you can add different items.
For example, let's say I wanted to go in here
and added a new account, for example, Gmail.
The username for that was titancipher@gmail.com.
And then we can select our password.
If we have a current password
that may not be very secure like password,
we can put that in and it will save it for us,
or we can choose to have it generate
a random long, strong password for us.
If I click that button,
you'll see it will overwrite the current password
with a nice, long, strong password.
From here we can choose to either use a password
or a username, a password or a passphrase,
and how long we want it to be.
In my case, I want it to be a password
that's at least 14 characters long, has uppercase,
lowercase, numbers, and special characters.
And at this point I have everything the way I want.
I can go ahead and hit Select
and this will then create
that nice, long, strong random password.
Now don't worry about memorizing this password
'cause it doesn't really matter.
Once we save this and we try to log into Google,
it's going to be able to use this password for us
to be able to log in to that account.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit Save here.
And now that I've done that,
you can see that Google is here.
If I wanted to be able to get my username from that,
I can click on the head and this will copy that
and then I can paste that anywhere I needed to,
for example, right there.
Or if I wanted to be able to go ahead
and grab that password, I can again click right into here,
type in Gmail, and then click on the password key.
Once I do that,
it's copied that long, strong password again for me.
And from here I'm able to paste it in
and you can see that long, strong password.
In addition to that, when you go to a website like Gmail
and you try to log in,
it's going to allow you to be able to log in
using that BitLocker login.
So I'll click here
and it'll be able to find that I have Gmail
and from here I'll click on that
and it will allow me to copy in that username.
In addition to that, we can then put in our password
by doing the exact same thing, going into here,
selecting our Google account
and then copying and pasting in that password
and then clicking Next in order to log in.
And from here we're now logged into this account
and we'll have no issues moving forward in using Bitwarden.
Now also, whenever you're using Bitwarden,
anytime you try to log into a new site for the first time,
it'll ask you if you want to remember
its username and password.
For example, let's say I wanted to go
and create a new account at something like carnival.com,
which is a cruise provider here in the United States.
If I wanted to do that, I can can go here to carnival.com
and then once I get to the website,
I can then click on Create an account.
And from here I'm going to go ahead
and enter in the username and password that I want to use.
In this case, titancipher@gmail.com.
And then when I go to password, again, I'm going to go in here
and I'm going to choose a random password using my generator.
Once I have that, I'll paste it in.
If I hit Show password,
you'll see it's that same password I just had
and then click Sign up.
Once you get to the website
and you click on Login or Create an account,
in my case I already have an account,
so I'm going to click on Login,
and when I go here it's going to be able to go
and find that inside of Bitwarden any passwords
that I've already saved there.
So if you click here on Bitwarden,
you'll see that I already have carnival.com
and titancipher@gmail.com.
If I simply click on my name here,
it'll automatically fill it in both locations
and allow me to click Login
to be able to access this website
just like I could if I enter
the username and password myself.
The really big benefit of using something like Bitwarden
is that you can have all of your details in one place
and one secure method that is fully encrypted
and protected using the long, strong password
that we created as our original master password.
This protects all the other passwords
and if I log into my actual Bitwarden account
I use at work,
I have hundreds and thousands of different passwords
and I can control them all from within Bitwarden
and I only have to memorize one key password
that serves as my encryption phrase.
So keep this in mind
when you're using your password managers.
Password managers are an awesome tool
to give you additional security
and prevent you from having password reuse
across your organization.