She says it isn’t “computationally possible” for hackers to break the encryption of most password managers at the moment, so you can be assured your passwords are safe in a password manager. One of the biggest fears with password managers, Tobac says, is that saving all your passwords in an account with a single password would make you more vulnerable to data theft.

Forty-two percent reuse passwords across accounts, and 17 percent of us recycle as few as two to five passwords for everything. Despite this, a 2020 survey from the credit-scoring company FICO found that only 23 percent of Americans use an encrypted password manager.

More recent data breaches include McDonald’s, Peloton, and Volkswagen. She says it’s a matter of “when, not if, one of the websites you use gets breached.” At that point, “any services you use that password for are at risk.” From January to March of 2021, 51 million people had their data compromised in a breach, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit dedicated to helping victims of identity theft. “Password managers are essential for everyone,” says Rachel Tobac, CEO of the cybersecurity company SocialProof Security. And considering that many password managers offer free versions, there’s really no excuse not to have one. According to the security experts we consulted, it’s the best option for protecting everything from financial data to drugstore loyalty accounts. The manager safely stores all of your other passwords for you, often allowing you to access your passwords from any computer, tablet, or phone. With a password manager, however, you only need to remember one master password. This made for a tough password to crack, with one downside: It was an equally tough password to remember. Eventually, the instructions were to come up with seemingly random strings of characters, numbers, and symbols. Instead, we were told to use assortments of words and numbers - until that wasn’t hard enough, either. That’s just too easy to crack, security experts say. The days of using your first child’s name and birth date for all your passwords are long gone.

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