How Private Equity Ruined LastPass

As I and all of the news outlets have reported LastPass the password organizer has been breached, and gave up a lot of personal, and business data to hackers. As it turns out this was much bigger than previously reported, and a Wall Street firm is to blame for it. Read about LastPass’s history with…

My LastPass Replacement

You might have heard that LastPass is changing their free account to only allowing one device. The Premium account is only $3 per month but the change has given me an incentive to find a new password manager. I looked at several LastPass, a few were mobile apps only and that was no good. Some…

Password Checkup Extension

Password Checkup helps you secure accounts that were affected by data breaches. Wherever you sign-in, if you enter a username and password that is no longer safe due to appearing in a data breach known to Google, you’ll receive an alert. Please reset your password. If you use the same username and password for any…

Secure Your Google Services

If your like me you live on Google. Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Maps, Photos, etc. I use them all and if I lost access to my Google account I would be in big trouble. How do I keep your Google services safe? You start with a really long password with upper and lower case letters, numbers…

Don’t Run As Administrator

As the sixth tip says, “Don’t run as Administrator”. Any program you run while using an admin account has those same privilegdes this includes malware. UAC (user access control) has limited the danger some but it is far better for you to not have those privilegdes at all. Of course you will not be able to…

LastPass, Good For Now

October 13th on Security Now Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte had Joe Siegrist of LastPass to talk about the acquisition of LastPass by LogMeIn. Looks like for now Joe will remain at LastPass to run things. Joe said that LogMeIn had no plans to change things, at least for now. I gather from this conversation that…

LastPass Not Broken!

The news about the LastPass network breach has been completely blown out of proportion by the media. None of your private data has been exposed. What may have been exposed was a salted and hashed version of your email address, master pass-phase, per user salts and authentication hashes. All of this appears as random gobbledigook and requires…

FIDO and the Yubikey U2F

The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is an industry consortium launched in February 2013 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices and the problems users face creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. PayPal and Lenovo were among the founders. The FIDO U2F Security Key by Yubico is a specially designed YubiKey,…

What is LastPass?

LastPass Password Manager is a freemium password management service developed by LastPass. It is available as a plugin for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari. There is also a LastPass Password Manager bookmarklet for other browsers. LastPass seeks to resolve the password fatigue problem by centralising user password management in the cloud….