The 3 things you need to know about passwords, from a security expert
The 3 things you need to know about passwords, from a security expert
Publish Date: 2026-03-13 11:01:00
Source Domain: www.newscientist.com
Passwords are both a curse and a blessing
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Passwords occupy an odd place in our lives. They’re both a blessing – keeping our data and information safe from anyone intruding into our IT systems and accessing them – and a curse, in that they’re often difficult to manage and tricky to remember. Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore at ESET, a European cybersecurity firm, is here with three tips to help you rethink your relationship with passwords – and hopefully keep hackers at bay.
1. Use a password manager, even if it feels counterintuitive
I’m a big fan of password managers, and I think they’re wildly underused. Depending on where you are in the world, and who’s doing the study, only around one-third of people use password managers. That to me seems a criminally low number. They’re a gamechanger. They give you the ability to create long passwords for your account and to store them securely. They’re so good at generating the passwords for you, you don’t have to think of one.
That’s important because we know that when people are asked to come up with their own passwords, they tend to rely on things or words they know – all of which could be information a hacker or bad actor could have on you, and could make you vulnerable. They also nullify another big risk, which is people reusing passwords across accounts. If a password is used by someone else, even just one person, and that person’s account is breached, it can end up in the tables of vulnerable passwords that are used to try and probe and test getting access to accounts.
I sometimes wonder why people don’t use password managers more. It might be that they misunderstand how password managers work, thinking that storing passwords online somewhere that can be unlocked with a single password is insecure. But it’s not. The vault in which the passwords are stored isn’t just a simple list of passwords sitting on a server: your data is encrypted on…
