LastPass

28 'LastPass' stories October 2013 - December 2014

LastPass matches Dashlane with automated password changing – but it doesn’t yet fully compete

Ben Lovejoy Dec 10 2014 - 6:52 am PT

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After password manager Dashlane grabbed the limelight yesterday with an automated password changer for 50 top US websites, LastPass has hit back with its own version of the same feature. However, while LastPass supports more sites, it falls short of the Dashlane offering by forcing you to change one password at a time, rather than doing all supported sites en-mass, and not yet supporting sites that employ two-factor authentication.

We’re excited to announce that the Auto-Password Change feature we released to our Pre-Build Team last week is now available for all users in beta. LastPass can now change passwords for you, automatically. We’re releasing this feature for free to all our users, on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox (starting with version 3.1.70) […]

Auto-Password Change already supports 75 of the most popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Pinterest, Home Depot, and Dropbox.

LastPass notes that it does this while maintaining its secure approach of ensuring that only encrypted versions of the password are ever stored on the LastPass server, with the apps doing the decrypting on your device.

You can download the beta from the LastPass download site. If you’re not yet using a password manager, check out out our how-to guide.

The worst password of all is no longer ‘password’ according to hacked accounts chart

Ben Lovejoy Jan 20 2014 - 4:27 am PT

16 Comments

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You might have thought that it would be hard to come up with a worse password than ‘password,’ but according to a chart compiled by SplashData from hacked accounts, it has been edged out by ‘123456’.

The far more secure ‘12345678’ (33 percent more secure!) retains its position as number three, while a new entry in sixth place goes as far as ‘123456789’. Sadly, ‘letmein’, a password I always felt deserving of classic status, dropped seven places to achieve a mediocre ranking of 14.

Apple introduced iCloud Keychain as part of Mavericks and iOS 7.0.3, and if you’re not already using it, you can read our how-to guide. If you’re using older versions of OS X or iOS, we also ran a how-to guide on using a password manager to have unique, secure passwords for each website.

Via re/code

LastPass password manager iOS app gets simplified UI & family logins

Ben Lovejoy Nov 5 2013 - 4:35 am PT

15 Comments

The popular free password manager app LastPass has been given a revamped user-interface across iOS app, Android app and browser add-on, aimed at both a cleaner look and greater ease of use.

Paid users also get access to a new Shared Family Folder, allowing up to five users to get shared access to joint logins. The LastPass blog highlights the new features in version 3.0 as:

Revamped user experience and user interface
Field icon menus for easy access to logins and LastPass tools
A Shared Family Folder for up to 5 users
Expanded Shared Folder features for LastPass Enterprise
A revamped LastPass for Applications
Secure Note history, to track changes to your notes

LastPass is a free download, and we have a detailed tutorial on how to use it.

How to: Use a password manager to have strong, unique passwords for each website

Ben Lovejoy Oct 10 2013 - 6:46 am PT

26 Comments

Image: redorbit.com

Evernote, Adobe, even Apple … just a few of the companies who have found their user data compromised by hackers in recent times. The possibility of a hacker being able to access one of your web accounts is worrying enough – but if you use the same email address and password for almost all the websites you use, the risk becomes huge.

The first thing a hacker does when they get hold of a list of usernames and passwords is to use automated software to fire them at a whole bunch of popular websites. That means your online security is only as good as the most vulnerable of the websites you visit. Not good.

The answer, of course, is to use a unique – and strong – password for each website you access. But that creates its own hassles. Strong passwords aren’t easily memorised. Sure, we can ask our browsers to store logins for us, but when you might use several different computers, an iPhone and an iPad, you’d have to login once from each device as soon as you chose the password so it gets stored before you forget it. Not very convenient.

Which is where password managers come in. When you see the instructions, it’ll look like a long process, but it in fact takes only 10-20 mins if you have two or three devices …
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