Then they use sophisticated hardware that can try over 350 billion passwords per second to decrypt as many of the stolen passwords as possible. The bad guys get passwords by stealing them by the millions from Web sites with lax security.

First off, no one is explicitly targeted. Guess what? Such an approach is extremely dangerous on today’s Internet. Plus, most people don’t think they have much to protect or that they would be targeted by hackers, so they reuse the same password across multiple sites. And that’s for accounts people care about-for those that they don’t see as important, they’re likely to use a simple password like their child’s or pet’s name. Lots of people think that all they need to do to keep their online accounts secure is create a single password with some numbers, often switching a lowercase L with a 1 and a capital E with a 3.

We often recommend using a password manager like 1Password or LastPass, but we’ve gotten a few questions asking why we’re so adamant about this.

Lastpass m1