Why strong passwords are important?

Using strong passwords is crucial for protecting your online accounts and sensitive information. Strong passwords are difficult for hackers to guess, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. Strong passwords in conjuction with a tool which makes it easy to generate them (like HPASS), and eliminates a need to remember or store passwords, offer several advantages:

• Security: Strong password include a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols, making them harder to crack through brute force or dictionary attacks.
• Privacy: Robust passwords safeguard your personal and financial data, preventing identity theft and privacy breaches.
• Account Protection: Strong passwords help defend against unauthorized access to your accounts, securing your emails, social media, and online banking.
• Simplified Digital Life: Easy to generate strong passwords minimize "Forgot your password?" situations and the need of going through the time consuming process of resetting password.

Passwords Do's:

• Use account specific passwords
• For all important accounts (email, financial sites, etc.) use multi-factor authentication (MFA) whenever possible.
• Use long (at least 12-15 characters), complex passwords. Longer is always better, but some sites have a restriction of password length. Default length 15 selected for HPASS seems to be a reasonable compromise between security and convenience.

Passwords Don't

• Do not reuse the same password for multiple accounts
• Do not use easy patterns, dictionary words or easily guessable personal data. Few examples of most commonly used (and hacked!) passwords: 123456, password, qwerty, 111111, abc123, password1, iloveyou, 1q2w3e4r.
• Never share your passwords with others, particularly as plain text in email, etc.

But how?

You may ask, but how possibly can I create, and remember long, complex and site specific passwords for multiple - perhaps hundreds - sites. As you may have guessed, our recommendation is to use HPASS to simplify this aspect of your life :) - see more on how HPASS can help, and why it might be better solution for you than password manager, in Info section. If you have specific questions please do not hesitate to send email to info@hpass.app.

Password Generators vs. Managers

One of the often recommended solutions is to use Password Manager [PM]. The advantage of PMs is that in addition to storing passwords they allow to store any number of other data (credit card numbers, PINs, social security numbers, etc) and some allow to share this information with other users. While convenient, this type of centralized storage attracts hackers with the prospect of potentially stealing sensitive and valuable data for milions of users and creates single point of failure.

Try HPASS. It is the single-minded and narrowly focused tool to help with easy generation and use of strong, secure and site-specific passwords. You can find more on how HPASS can help, and why you may want to consider it, in Info section.

Further reading

1. How Password Managers Can Get Hacked
2. Browser password managers – flawed security, by design!
3. 20 Most Hacked Passwords in 2023: Is Yours Here?
4. https://proton.me/blog/how-long-should-my-password-be
5. NIST Password Best Practices
6. Are password managers safe to use in 2023?

To change site settings enter site hint in the Hint field, populate Secret, Special Character, and Length with desired values, and press save icon .

Do the same to change generic settings, but with empty Hint field.

• Hint: keep it empty to change generic settings; enter value to change site settings.
• Secret (🤫): makes generated passwords unique for you.
• Special Character (🌶): one or more !\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[ ]^_`{|}~
• Length (📏): longer is better, note however that a lot of sites have unreasonably short upper limit - 15 seems to be a reasonable balance between security and a need to create many site-specific settings.