What I offer to Secure Your Personal Data
You must make use of a password manager application if you want to properly safeguard your data online.
A password manager is one of the first steps in preventing your account from being used by malicious people (i.e. hackers, scam artists/frauds, etc.).
I can assist you with getting you setup on any password manager, and would be happy to help! Alternatively, I also host my own instance of a popular open-sourced Password Manager called Bitwarden. I provide this all for very cheap in order to encourage it’s use, as I want to see everyone using a password manager to keep their online accounts safe and secure.
I have named this service “Password Vault“. The current pricing for Password Vault can be found on the Services page.
Hosted Password Vault
I offer a hosted version of Bitwarden to my users. Bitwarden is open-source and security-audited software, which is relatively new in the game of password managers compared to established providers such as 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane, but Bitwarden is the only open-source application that has client applications on all mobile devices, desktops, and web access.
It’s also self-hosted, which security-conscious people such as myself love to see and use as it allows for more control of the data, not to mention it’s no longer as big a target when compared with the established providers, since self-hosted data means the data is distributed as opposed to in a single network publicly known to hackers trying to access the established players.
Password Manager Training
Need training on Bitwarden or any other password manager you’ve chosen to use? I’ll gladly help you get started on those services while also offering training to use them effectively.
I am so passionate in getting people to use password managers that even if you choose not to use the service I offer, I’ll still happily train you up on the others to make sure that you stick with using a password manager to secure your data and online accounts.
Frequently Asked Questions on Password Managers
A password manager is a software application that’s sole mission is to allow you to save your passwords and other critical data in a safe space, encrypted, and usually also protected with bio-authentication such as Face ID or Touch ID.
The purpose of a password manager is to allow a user to safely store important data, generating new secure passwords that are unique to each site, and notifying you of possible breaches by sites where you have an account.
Unfortunately it’s not a matter of if but when your data is compromised by a service provider, as has been seen many times now by notable breaches at companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, The Home Depot, Target, Reddit, Equifax, and many (many!) more. Even Canadian companies are prone to large data breaches such as those at Bell Canada, Desjardins, LifeLabs, and more. If you have credit cards stored on accounts online, or user information that can be used to identify you (i.e. a phone number, mailing address, etc.), hackers can use these details to get into your other accounts especially if they share the same password (or very similar password).
One of the biggest cases of hacks end up being pre-exposed data, and the user reusing the same password (or very similar ones) on other websites. You should never use the same password for your email as your bank accounts, for example. But how are we supposed to remember several dozen unique passwords for our online accounts? Through the use of a password manager. It will generate strong passwords for you, and you can easily track passwords across all your accounts and keeping everything unique. This means that if someone gets access to your email, they shouldn’t also have access to your bank accounts.
Ultimately, you need a password manager to keep your data as secure as possible. While you cannot control if another company suffers a data breach, you can minimize the impact to you with the use of a password manager when such an event happens.
Yes and no. If you’re using a spreadsheet or a text file that’s not encrypted, then yes this can be bad because as soon as someone has a copy of it then they have everything. However, if you’ve got the data properly encrypted and other security measures in place, then no this isn’t really a concern that’d negatively impact your data.
Worst case if you were using a password manager and the data was compromised / stolen, all they’d have in their possession is a well-encrypted file which will take them a very long time to get into (depending on resources they have available), giving you ample time to go through and change all your online credentials before they’d even get close to accessing your data. That’s the absolute worst-case though.