Many devices in your smart home, from your Wi-Fi router to a new baby monitor, may ship with a default username and password, such as “admin” for both credentials. You should change them as soon as possible to avert exposure to botnets designed to take over devices with easily guessed login credentials.

Google now has a feature where it will ask if you’d like to generate a unique password when signing up on a website. If you opt to do so, Google will create a strong password for that site and remember it for you. Google essentially acts as a password manager. This feature should be enabled […]

Strong passwords are among the best defenses against account hacking. Regularly changing them provides additional protection. If you receive a notification about a data breach affecting one of your accounts, that’s a good occasion to update all your passwords. It may be a good to also implement two-factor authentication on accounts if possible.

Google will notify you both in Chrome via pop-up and through email when any of your saved passwords are compromised. Change them as quickly as possible to prevent personal information from being leaked. It’s worth noting that you have to change passwords on each individual site where they were compromised. Passwords are most easily compromised […]

Reusing the same password across accounts means that if it’s stolen even once, everything from your personal email to your Facebook could be hijacked. Also, the most frequently reused passwords are easily guessed, such as “password” and “123456.” Use a password manager to produce and securely store strong, unique passwords for every login.

An account should not be able to recover your password for you. Your password is encrypted and known only to you. If you lose the password, the service associated with the account should reset it and send you a new password that you can then change. If the service says it can recover your password […]